Israel's Booster Rocket Comes Out of the Basement

By Michael Collins Dunn

When Israel's Ofeq 1 satellite rose over the Mediterranean coast on September 19, press commentary concentrated on what the satellite could do and what military applications might be involved, either with the current satellite or its successors. (A second launch was expected a month or so after the first, and besides the potentially military Ofeq, or Horizon, series, Israel is working on a communication satellite called the Amos.) But most commentators steered clear of one important aspect of the launch. Almost certainly, the tapes of the launch of Ofeq 1 gave the world its first view of Israel's intermediate-range ballistic missile booster, widely considered a primary nuclear delivery system. While a few press reports did note the link between satellite launch capability and ballistic missiles, there was little effort to link the satellite launch with the broader issue of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, which had provoked much alarm in the cases of Iran and Iraq and the Chinese missiles in Saudi Arabia.

At Least 200 Israeli Nuclear Warheads

Israel's nuclear policy has sometimes been called the "bomb in the basement" strategy, since it has never admitted possessing nuclear weapons despite enormous evidence that it does so. Not only CIA evaluations but the details leaked by Mordechai Vannu, now in an Israeli prison, suggest that Israel has at least 200 nuclear warheads. In addition to the bomb in the basement, Israel has also kept its missile delivery system out of sight. Now, however, the booster at least is out of the basement, since Israel's satellite was launched with what was described as a Shavit booster. Israeli military censors made sure that descriptions of both the launcher and the launch site remained vague. References in press reports were limited to the rocket's having been observed by bathers at "an Israeli beach," not further specified. Apparently the launch site was near Yavne, south of the scientific complex at Rehovot. But the booster itself, though shown in tapes of the launch, was described only as a multistage Shavit rocket.

The name Shavit, which means "comet" in Hebrew, is not a new one. On July 5, 1961, Israel launched a domestically built rocket called the Shavit, which was essentially a sounding rocket. Some French technology may have been made available for its development. But if there is a direct genealogical link between the Shavit of 27 years ago and that which propelled the Israeli satellite into orbit, it must be a long genealogy indeed. The launch vehicle appears to bear no more resemblance to the Shavit of 1961 than do current satellites of the Soviet Cosmos series to the first basketball-sized Cosmos launched in 1958.

For one thing, Israel's current Shavit launch booster is no sounding rocket, but, reportedly, a three-stage vehicle. It probably bears a great deal of similarity to another multistage launch system, Israel's long-hidden ballistic missile.

Israeli military censors made sure that descriptions of both the launcher and the launch remained vague.

The technologies required to launch a satellite into earth orbit and those required to deposit a warhead on a target hundreds or thousands of miles away are quite similar. The main difference lies in the guidance system requirements. In some ways, space launch capability is more difficult to achieve than a surface-to-surface ballistic missile capability. Military analysts have long warned that certain Third World space launch programs, like India's for example, are little more than fig leaves for ballistic missile development programs.

For years, details have gradually emerged of an Israeli missile system usually called, in the West, the Jericho. In more recent years, there has been talk of a longer-range system, the Jericho II. Israel has never acknowledged the existence of either missile, though Western intelligence agencies have long known of the system and some Westerners have actually seen the missiles. Jericho II is known to be a multistage, intermediate range missile capable of delivering a small payload over 1,500 kilometers or more. Such a missile makes little sense, due to its small payload, except as a delivery system for a non-conventional warhead, nuclear or chemical.

Resemblance to the Jericho

Was the satellite booster a Jericho? Probably not precisely, since the upper stage would have needed modification. Both the US and the Soviet Union, however, first used ballistic missile designs to propel their satellites into orbit. The US tried to design a dedicated satellite launcher, the Vanguard, but ended up putting its first satellite into orbit on a modified Redstone IRBM. Existing pictures of the Shavit probably provide the first public revelations of the lower stages of Israel's current generation ballistic missiles. Jericho II, it should be emphasized, is merely a convenient Western tag for the current generation ballistic missile, derived from the supposed name Jericho for the first generation. Israel may well call the booster something else.

The launch of Ofeq 1 did not reveal anything about Israel's ballistic missile capability which was not already known or suspected. Because Israel has always denied having ballistic missiles at all, however, the satellite launch vehicle did finally confirm that the booster is out of the basement.

Michael C. Dunn is senior analyst at International Estimate, a Washington, DC, consultancy, and lecturer at Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies.