How the nuclear race in ME got started

Kulapavana · February 15, 2006

Synopsis: How Israel got nukes—and set off today's Middle Eastern arms race.

Source: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com

Published: February 15, 2006 Author: Jacob Heilbrunn

When Israel successfully developed a nuclear bomb in the 1960s, it inadvertently became a kind of role model for a motley crew of regimes in the Middle East and elsewhere. Being first off the block had big advantages for Israel, especially during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when the threat of a bomb may have helped keep its enemies at bay. But whether it's India, Pakistan, or the most recent nuclear aspirants, Iran and North Korea, the same scenario seems to play, or be playing, itself out with distressing regularity. A regime denies that it's developing nuclear weapons, foils outside observation, and then, voila, manages to enter the nuclear club. It's not hard to see why this would be so. A good deal of hypocrisy surrounds the official five nuclear powers—Britain, France, the United States, China, and Russia—under the terms of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which have sought to keep a monopoly on the product. Take the United States. The Bush administration has sought to lower the threshold for using tactical nuclear bombs while at the same time trying to deny them to pretty much everyone else. Obtaining a bomb has thus become a satisfying way of thumbing one's nose at the imperialistic Yankees and sending them into a frenzy.

The Bomb in the Basement

by Michael Karpin

Simon & Schuster, $26.00

Michael Karpin's The Bomb in the Basement, therefore, arrives at a timely moment. Karpin, a prominent Israeli television and radio news reporter who has written several books, including one on the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, has ventured into what remains largely forbidden territory in his own country. Mordechai Vanunu, a technician at Israel's once-secret Dimona nuclear weapons factory, was kidnapped in Italy in 1986 by Mossad (Israel's vaunted intelligence service) and ended up serving 18 years in jail for divulging nuclear secrets to the British Sunday Times. Based on a documentary he produced several years ago, Karpin's history relies heavily on interviews with many of the scientists and politicians, including Shimon Peres, who were vital in creating an Israeli nuclear weapon. Karpin may not be the first to write about this topic, which was covered by Avner Cohen's scholarly Israel and the Bomb (1998), but he provides the most comprehensive and illuminating account of Israel's path and its policy of “strategic ambiguity” about nuclear weapons. Perhaps it is a sign of Israel's maturity as a state that it can now permit books like Karpin's to appear—though it appears censored. Or perhaps it is merely a useful way of reminding Israel's foes, (like Iran) about the apparent dimensions of its arsenal, which is said to include several hundred nuclear missiles, not to mention nuclear-armed submarines.

As Karpin correctly stresses, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the key to developing a bomb. On Dec. 21, 1960, he told the Israeli . in an emotional speech that Dimona existed and was “meant to be used only for peaceful purposes.” The Holocaust loomed large in Israel's consciousness, and Ben-Gurion was convinced that possession of a bomb was central to avoiding a repetition of the slaughter of Jews. Ben-Gurion assembled a crack scientific team led by a brilliantly inventive German émigré named Ernst Bergmann who ran roughshod over bureaucratic obstacles. Karpin focuses on the tensions that threatened to derail the project before it had even gotten started. Some of Karpin's most interesting passages focus on the army's reluctance to develop a bomb, which it viewed as a costly and futile sideshow. The army leadership believed that Israel would be better off focusing on amassing more mundane weaponry. Ben-Gurion disagreed. He created a black budget for the bomb that would have sent his generals into conniptions had they only known about it. “Israel's nuclear project was run,” says Karpin, “like a state within a state.”

Karpin is also very good on the reciprocal advantages that Israel and France derived from cooperating with each other. Karpin rightly notes that Israel would never have been able to build a bomb without the assistance of the French. Shimon Peres, the young head of the defense ministry who always fancied himself an intellectual savant, got on well with his French counterparts. For their part, the French were eager to have access to the Israeli scientific establishment in order to speed the process of constructing their own bomb. What's more, the French coveted intelligence on Algeria, where they were waging a bitter and ultimately disastrous war against Islamic militants. What Israel—or, more precisely, Ben-Gurion—wanted from the French was a nuclear reactor. In return for Israeli help in the 1956 Suez War, France agreed to cough one up. This was heady stuff for Israel, which was for the first time playing in the big leagues of great-power politics. On Oct. 29, 1956, Israel launched an assault on Egypt that triggered the Suez War. “By agreeing that Israel would take part in the Suez campaign,” writes Karpin, “Ben-Gurion was taking a grave risk in view of the inevitably angry response of the Soviet Union and the likely displeasure of the United States.” No matter. Ben-Gurion was prepared to pretty much sacrifice anything in order to get hold of a nuclear bomb. Once Norway agreed in 1959 to sell heavy water to Israel, the course was clear.

The surprising, or perhaps not so surprising, thing is that it took the United States until 1960 to begin to comprehend that Israel really was building a bomb. The CIA report on the failure to identify the Dimona project earlier has a familiar ring. It said: “The general feeling that Israel could not achieve this capability without outside aid from the U.S. or its allies… led to the tendency to discount rumors of Israeli reactor construction and French collaboration in the nuclear weapons area.” Interestingly, Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser was fooled by the Israelis. He thought Israel was simply disseminating propaganda to make itself seem more powerful than it actually was. It's important to remember that, in the 1960s, the notion of a small state like Israel constructing a bomb did seem improbable.

Shortly after becoming president, John F. Kennedy successfully pressured Ben-Gurion into allowing a team of Americans to inspect Dimona, but they saw what they wanted to see, being unable to find any evidence that it was other than a peaceful project. Richard M. Nixon cut a deal with Golda Meir in which Israel agreed to forego the idea of public testing in exchange for American acquiescence and an end to inspections. Anyway, the United States wasn't that interested in harassing Israel publicly. Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol came up with the Delphic formulation “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East” to satisfy the Americans. It didn't take much. Once the Middle East became the cockpit of superpower tensions, the United States became Israel's staunch backer and had little interest in subjecting it to international inspections.

Karpin doesn't speculate about it, but the Israeli example must have emboldened other powers to go down the same path. Status quo powers like Saudi Arabia don't need an atomic bomb—at least not until the Iranians procure one. Karpin suggests that Israel might take out—as it did in 1983 Saddam Hussein's nascent project—Iran's effort at constructing a bomb. But exactly how this would occur, he does not say. An attack that failed to take out the Iranian reactor would be worse than not attacking. And thanks to the Bush administration's maladroit handling of the run-up to the Iraq war, not to mention the aftermath, it was harder than ever to assemble an international coalition that might be able to exert any pressure on Tehran.

Karpin is undaunted. He ends with an effusion about how a nuclear-free Middle East might look. But this is pious nonsense. His book offers scant room for optimism. Israel conducted its search for a nuclear bomb with restraint and diplomatic dexterity. The bluff and bombast emanating from the lunatics in Tehran could not be further removed from Israel's emphasis on nuclear weapons as a last resort. Israel has always understood something that Iran does not: how to keep a secret secret.

February 17, 2006

Why No Nukes for Iran? The rules of the game

By Victor Davis Hanson

How many times have we heard the following whining and yet received no specific answers from our leaders?

"Israel has nuclear weapons, so why single out Iran?"

"Pakistan got nukes and we lived with it."

"Who is to say the United States or Russia should have the bomb and not other countries?"

"Iran has promised to use its reactors for peaceful purposes, so why demonize the regime?"

In fact, the United States has a perfectly sound rationale for singling out Iran to halt its nuclear proliferation. At least six good reasons come to mind, not counting the more obvious objection over Iran's violation of U.N. non-proliferation protocols. It is past time that we spell them out to the world at large.

First, we cannot excuse Iran by acknowledging that the Soviet Union, Communist China, North Korea, and Pakistan obtained nuclear weapons. In each case of acquisition, Western foreign-policy makers went into a crisis mode, as anti-liberal regimes gained stature and advantage by the ability to destroy Western cities.

A tragic lapse is not corrected by yet another similar mistake, especially since one should learn from the errors of the past. The logic of "They did it, so why can't I?" would lead to a nuclearized globe in which our daily multifarious wars, from Darfur to the Middle East, would all assume the potential to go nuclear. In contrast, the fewer the nuclear players, the more likely deterrence can play some role. There is no such thing as abstract hypocrisy when it is a matter of Armageddon.

Second, it is a fact that full-fledged democracies are less likely to attack one another. Although they are prone to fighting — imperial Athens and republican Venice both were in some sort of war about three out of four years during the 5th century B.C. and the 16th century respectively — consensual governments are not so ready to fight like kind. In contemporary terms that means that there is no chance whatsoever that an anti-American France and an increasingly anti-French America would, as nuclear democracies, attack each other. Russia, following the fall of Communism, and its partial evolution to democracy, poses less threat to the United States than when it was a totalitarian state.

It would be regrettable should Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, or Germany go nuclear — but not the catastrophe of a nuclear Pakistan that, with impunity de facto, offers sanctuary to bin Laden and the planners of 9/11. The former governments operate under a free press, open elections, and free speech, and thus their war-making is subject to a series of checks and balances. Pakistan is a strongman's heartbeat away from an Islamic theocracy. And while India has volatile relations with its Islamic neighbor, the world is not nearly as worried about its arsenal as it is about autocratic Pakistan's.

Third, there are a number of rogue regimes that belong in a special category: North Korea, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, unfree states whose leaders have sought global attention and stature through sponsoring insurrection and terrorism beyond their borders. If it is scary that Russia, China, and Pakistan are now nuclear, it is terrifying that Kim Jong Il has the bomb, or that President Ahmadinejad might. Islamic fundamentalism or North Korean Stalinism might be antithetical to scientific advancement, but it is actually conducive to nuclear politics. When such renegade regimes go nuclear they gain the added lunatic edge: "We are either crazy or have nothing to lose or both — but you aren't." In nuclear poker, the appearance of derangement is an apparent advantage.

Fourth, there are all sorts of scary combinations — petrodollars, nukes, terrorism, and fanaticism. But Iran is a uniquely fivefold danger. It has enough cash to buy influence and exemption; nuclear weapons to threaten civilization; oil reserves to blackmail a petroleum hungry world; terrorists to either find sanctuary under a nuclear umbrella or to be armed with dirty bombs; and it has a leader who wishes either to take his entire country into paradise, or at least back to the eighth century amid the ashes of the Middle East.

Just imagine the present controversy over the cartoons in the context of President Ahmadinejad with his finger on a half-dozen nuclear missiles pointed at Copenhagen.

Fifth, any country that seeks "peaceful" nuclear power and is completely self-sufficient in energy production is de facto suspect. Iran has enough natural gas to meet its clean electrical generation needs for centuries. The only possible rationale for its multi-billion-dollar program of building nuclear reactors, and spending billions more to hide and decentralize them, is to obtain weapons, and thus to gain clout and attention in a manner that otherwise is not warranted by either Iranian conventional forces, cultural influence, or economic achievement.

Sixth, the West is right to take on a certain responsibility to discourage nuclear proliferation. The technology for such weapons grew entirely out of Western science and technology. In fact, the story of nuclear proliferation is exclusively one of espionage, stealthy commerce, or American and European-trained native engineers using their foreign-acquired expertise. Pakistan, North Korea, and Iran have no ability themselves to create such weapons, in the same manner that Russia, China, and India learned or stole a craft established only from the knowledge of European-American physics and industrial engineering. Any country that cannot itself create such weapons is probably not going to ensure the necessary protocols to guard against their misuse or theft.

We can argue all we want over the solution — it is either immoral to use military force or immoral not to use it; air strikes are feasible or will be an operational disaster; dissidents will rise up or have already mostly been killed or exiled; Russia and China will help solve or will instead enjoy our dilemma; Europe is now on board or is already triangulating; the U.N. will at last step in, or is more likely to damn the United States than Teheran.

Yet where all parties agree is that a poker-faced United States seems hesitant to act until moments before the missiles are armed, and is certainly not behaving like the hegemon or imperialist power so caricatured by Michael Moore and an array of post-September 11 university-press books. Until there is firm evidence that Iran has the warheads ready, the administration apparently does not wish to relive the nightmare of the past three years in which striking Iran will conjure up all the old Iraqi-style hysteria about unilateralism, preemption, incomplete or cooked intelligence, imperialism, and purported hostility toward a Muslim country.

In the greatest irony of all, the Left (who must understand well the nightmarish scenario of a fascist Iran with nuclear weapons) is suddenly bewildered by George Bush's apparent multilateral caution. The Senate Democrats don't know whether to attack the administration now for its nonchalance or to wait and second-guess them once the bombs begin to fall.

Either way, no one should doubt that a nuclear Iran would end the entire notion of global adjudication of nuclear proliferation — as well as remain a recurrent nightmare to civilization itself.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

Kulapavana · February 17, 2006

"Victor Davis Hanson is a a member of the Democratic party but holds conservative views on many issues. Like neoconservatives, Hanson has strongly hawkish, pro-Israel views on the Middle East."

from Wikipedia

February 18, 2006

Why go to war and kill with nukes or bow and arrows?

Of course if a soldier felt uneasy about slaughtering others, they could always turn to a chaplain who would then patiently explain to them that killing is allowed by God and about the righteous morality of war.

He might then give a few Biblical examples of God-ordained killings. And then he might tell them that Jesus will forgive them and send them to Heaven if they should happen to die.