With Vanunu Revelations, World Learned Israel Had Nuclear Weapons

By Donald Neff

It was seven years ago, on Oct. 5, 1986, when the Sunday Times of London reported that Israel was a nuclear superpower. The tiny country had in its possession "at least 100 and as many as 200 nuclear weapons," making it a nuclear power rivaling Britain, China and France. The story said Israel had been producing the weapons at Dimona in the Negev Desert for 20 years.

The Sunday Times article was based on the testimony of a disaffected Israeli nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, 31. He had worked at Dimona for 10 years before he became disillusioned by Israel's nuclear policy and, after living in Australia, went to England to tell his story. Although it had long been speculated that Israel had a nuclear arsenal, Vanunu revealed details of Israel's nuclear program never before made public. He provided the Sunday Times with a cross-section drawing of the entire Dimona underground nuclear complex and photographs Vanunu said he had secretly taken of the control room. Vanunu said bombs were assembled in an underground complex called Machon 2 that extended six stories beneath the ground under a two-story building.

Vanunu's details were so convincing that nuclear experts pronounced themselves satisfied as to his accuracy. Frank Barnaby, former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and physicist at Britain's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, said Vanunu's evidence convinced him that Israel had both fission and fusion weapons.

Vanunu was later lured from Britain to Rome by an American blonde Mossad agent named "Cindy" and kidnapped back to Israel aboard a ship in the fall of 1986. On Nov. 9, 1986, Israel admitted Vanunu was a prisoner in Israel. But it has refused ever since to say how he had been brought there . On March 24, 1988, after a seven month trial closed to the public, he was found guilty of espionage and treason and sentenced to 18 years in prison.

A later book, Triple Cross: Israel, the Atomic Bomb and the Man Who Spilled the Secrets by Louis Toscano, claimed Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir proposed assassinating Vanunu but was turned down by Prime Minister Shimon Peres. Instead, Peres saw disclosure of the nuclear information as delivering a forceful deterrent to the Arabs without Israel having to publicly admit possession of such weapons. The book claimed Peres ordered Vanunu's kidnapping.

Vanunu today remains in a cramped cell in solitary confinement, where he has been kept since his apprehension seven years ago. His family fears Israeli authorities may be trying to drive him insane so that when his sentence expires he can be transferred directly to an asylum and his comments could be discounted as those of a lunatic. There are indications Israel has employed this inhumane technique in the past to discredit other Israeli dissidents.

Israel has done everything it could to hide its nuclear program.

While the general public may have found Vanunu's revelations sensational, they were not news to the CIA or American leaders. As early as 1968, the Central Intelligence Agency concluded that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. According to records of a 1976 classified briefing given by Carl Duckett, the CIA's deputy director for science and technology from 1967 to 1976, the agency informed President Johnson of this in early 1968. Johnson's response was to order the CIA not to inform any other members of the administration, including Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk.

In 1978, another CIA document on Israel's nuclear program became public. This one was a Sept. 14, 1974 five-page report that said: "We believe that Israel already has produced nuclear weapons." It said its conclusion was "based on Israeli acquisition of large quantities of uranium, partly by clandestine means." Other evidence cited by the CIA for its belief that Israel was producing nuclear weapons included "the ambiguous nature of Israeli efforts in the field of uranium enrichment, and Israel's large investment in a costly missile system designed to accommodate nuclear warheads."

Over the years Israel has done everything it could to mislead or hide from the United States its nuclear program. When questions first arose in 1960, Israel claimed the Dimona nuclear plant was a textile mill. Later that year it had to admit the nuclear nature of the plant but insisted that it was devoted to peaceful research. On Dec. 19, 1960, the State Department announced it had received assurances that "Israel has no intention of producing nuclear weapons and that its [nuclear] program is concerned exclusively with the peaceful uses of atomic energy."

Early U.S. Suspicions

Despite Israeli denials and Washington's public acceptance of them, informed American officials suspected even then that Israel was embarked on a major nuclear weapons program. Early in 1961, Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper exploded at a secret session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

"I think the Israelis have just lied to us like horse thieves on this thing. They have completely distorted, misrepresented and falsified the facts in the past. I think it is very serious, for things that we have done for them to have them perform in this manner in connection with this very definite production reactor facility [meaning it was specifically designed to produce plutonium] which they have been secretly building, and which they have consistently, and with a completely straight face, denied to us they were building."

Although Israel continued to insist the Dimona plant was dedicated to peaceful research, it refused repeated urgings by the United States to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty or accept IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) safeguards. To this day it has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty or allowed free inspection of its Dimona facilities by the United States. Between 1963 and 1969, American scientists were allowed to make limited inspections, but they halted when the scientists reported they were so severely constrained by Israeli authorities that they could not certify there were no bombs being made at Dimona. In fact, reported investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the Israelis went to the extent of building a false control room in Dimona to mislead the U.S. inspectors.

Despite such actions, it was an open secret in Washington well before Vanunu's revelations that Israel had the bomb. In fact, two legislators, Democratic Representatives Stephen J. Solarz and Jonathan B. Bingham, both of New York, dropped their amendment to ban U. S. aid to countries manufacturing nuclear weapons after admitting they were afraid it would affect Israel. Their action followed a private briefing by Under Secretary of State James L. Buckley on Dec. 8, 1981.

"We didn't want to find ourselves in a position where we had inadvertently and gratuitously created a situation that might lead to a cutoff of aid for Israel," Solarz said. "They left us with the impression that such a requirement might well trigger a finding by the administration that Israel has manufactured a bomb."

Donald Neff is author of the Warriors trilogy on U.S. -Middle East relations and of the unpublished Middle East Handbook, a chronological data bank of significant events affecting U.S. policy and the Middle East on which this article is based. His books are available through the AET Book Club.

Recommended Reading:

Beit-Hallahn-d, Benjamin, The Israeli Connection, New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.

Cervenka, Zdenck, and Barbara Rogers, The Nuclear Axis, New York: Times Books, 1978.

Cockburn, Andrew and Leslie, Dangerous Liaison, New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991.

Findley, Paul, Deliberate Deceptions, Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1993.

Gaffney, Mark, Dimona: The Third Temple? Brattleboro, VT: Amana Books, 1989,

Hersh, Seymour, The Samson Option, Now York: Random House, 1991.

Jabber, Fuad, Israel and Nuclear Weapons, London; Chatto and Windus, 1971.

Spector, Leonard S., Nuclear Proliferation Today, New York: Vintage Books, 1984.

Weissman, Steve and Herbert Krosney, The Islamic Bomb, New York: Times Books, 1981.

Notes:

¹Sunday limes of London, Oct. 5, 1986.

² Frank Barnaby, "The Nuclear Arsenal in the Middle East, " Journal of Palestine Saidies, Auftunn 1987, pp. 98-99, p. 102.

³Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, Oct. 29, 1986, March 24, 1988, The CBS-TV program "Sixty Minutes" had an excellent report on March 27, 1988 on how Vanunu was kidnapped, Also see Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, pp. 94-96; Hersh, The Samson Option, pp. 307-315; Raviv and Melman, Every Spy a Prince, pp. 360-372.

⁴Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times, Oct, 10, 1986.

⁵Glenn Frankel, Washington Post, March 25, 1986.

⁶ Ian Williams, "A Tale of Two Spies," Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July/August 1993.

⁷Washington Post, March 2, 1978; David Burnham, New York Times, March 2, 1978.

⁸New York Times, June 25, 1981. The document was released under a Freedom of Information Act request; the CIA later said the release W been a "mistake."

⁹Dana Adams Schmidt, New York Times, Dec. 22, 1960; State Department, American Foreign Policy 1960, "Statement Issued by the Department of State, Dec. 19, 1960," p. 501.

¹⁰Spector, Nuclear Proliferation, p. 121.

¹¹ 'Ibid., P. 126. Also see Beit-Hallahmi, The Israeli Connection, pp. 129-136; Cockburn, Dangerous Liaison, pp. W92.

¹²Hersh, The Samson Option, pp. 111, 210-211.

¹³See, for instance, Robert Manning and Stephen Talbot, "American Cover-Up on Israeli Bomb," The Middle East, June 1980; Ali A. Maznii et al, "Study on Israeli Nuclear Disarmament," United Nations Publication, 1982; Gary Milhollin, "Israel's Nuclear Shadow, " Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, University of Wisconsin, Nov. 10, 1986.

¹⁴Judith Miller, New York Times, Dec. 9, 1981.