A thoughtful member of the CPDCS board wrote yesterday saying that amidst the catastrophe of Israel’s shocking war on Iran, too few people in the U.S. know anything about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and if and how it has been used. There is a LOT in the U.S. press about Iran’s nuclear program, including its secrecy, but little about the Israeli arsenal.
You can jump ahead to scroll down to find a number of sources, but first a very little history:
I have followed the history of Israeli’s nuclear weapons program since before Mordechai Vanunu, the technician at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant who courageously shared his photographs of Israel’s nuclear weapons infrastructure in 1986 with the British press. He was kidnapped by the Mossad in Italy and suffered 18 years in Israeli prisons, eleven of those years were served in solitary confinement, and Vanunu has since been banned from leaving the country. You will find a link to a 60 Minutes video about and with him at the end of this post.
Among the people I have been privileged to work was Israeli General Mattityahu Peled, a courageous advocate for a two state Israeli Palestinian peace agreement. Matti was Israel’s number 3 general in 1967. He told me that after Egyptian President Nasser’s rhetoric precipitated the 1967 crisis, Israel’s military leadership advised Israeli President Eschol to ignore President Johnson’s efforts at mediation. The Israeli military knew what it could do, and in the first hours of the war they did it, destroying the Egyptian air force. Peled added that the attack was hurried to ensure that once the war was on, the Egyptians would not be able to bomb Dimona, as Israel has now done in Natanz, Iran.
In recent years, I have also been privileged to work with Sharon Dolev, an Israeli who has been working in Israel and internationally with the Middle East Treaty Organization for a Middle East Nuclear Weapons Free Zone. People – Middle East Treaty Organization
As I described in my book Empire and the Bomb, France assisted Israel in building its nuclear arsenal. French assistance came as a consolation prize and to relieve French guilt after London and Paris lured Israel to invading Egypt in the former colonial powers’ failed campaign to regain control of the Suez Canal.
Did Israel ever use its nuclear arsenal. Yes, as I wrote In Empire and the Bomb, and as you can hear in the attached video interview with Professor Avner Cohen, in 1973 Golda Meir threatened use of Israel’s “Temple Weapons.” That threat lead President Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to order the Pentagon to open the floodgates of spare parts and new weapons for Israel. That turned the tide of the “October War.”
RESOURCES
- Two excellent books have been written about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and related U.S. complicity. At more than considerable risk, Israeli born Professor Avner Cohen wrote what until now has been the definitive history of Israeli’s nuclear weapons program Israel and the Bomb (1998)
- Seymour Hersh’s 1991 The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy delves deeply into the history of Israel’s acquisition of the bomb the United States’ role.
- You can find the thoughtful hour-long interview with Avner Cohen at https://youtu.be/XV9buFcMdEI. In addition to the political history of Israel’s development and use of nuclear weapons, Cohen’s insights into similarities and differences between Israel’s early nuclear program and Iran’s is enlightening.
- 60 Minutes did an excellent 12-minute video with and about Mordechai Vanunu that you can find at https://youtu.be/zZYV-pYm5p8
- A 2010 Guardian article by James Petras describes Israeli-Apartheid nuclear weapons collaboration https://www.lahaine.org/petras/b2-img/petras_southa.pdf (I have another story about a conversation in Hiroshima with South African Prime Minister DeKlerk’s senior aide about his boss’ commitment to end the South African nuclear weapons program. For another time….)
Stop the killing! Work for a Nuclear Weapons Free World.