Bennett Ramberg: The Nowhere Bomb
[Bennett Ramberg has served as a foreign policy analyst and a consultant to the Department of State, U.S. Senate, Nuclear Control Institute, Henry Stimson Center, Global Green and Committee to Bridge the Gap.]
Should Jerusalem bring its bomb out of the basement? Israel, for at least the moment, is the sole possessor of atomic weapons in the Middle East, with an arsenal that now includes approximately 200 warheads. But it is also the only nuclear-armed nation to hide its cache behind a façade of official silence–neither confirming nor denying its existence....
Having won its War of Independence in 1948, Israel looked out at a daunting strategic landscape. Surrounded by adversaries with growing military capabilities, Israel had only a modest military force of its own. It had also failed in its efforts to enter into a military alliance with either Europe or the United States. And, with lingering fears that the Holocaust might repeat, David Ben-Gurion latched onto the notion that nuclear weapons would provide the ultimate security blanket.
Without resources to move forward on its own, the Jewish state aggressively cultivated France, which had fired up its first research reactor in 1948 and, soon after, invited scientists from Israel’s Weizmann Institute to collaborate on nuclear research. By 1953, Israel and France entered into a formal agreement on nuclear cooperation. Following the Suez crisis, that relationship grew even closer. With Paris’s help, around 1963, Israel opened its own reactor in Dimona, a remote corner of the Negev desert.
Washington wasn’t pleased. It was obsessed with curtailing the spread of the bomb. And, by the end of the Eisenhower administration, it began raising questions about the Dimona facility. Those questions fell to President Kennedy, who would make the lone serious effort to halt the Israeli program. Unconvinced by Ben-Gurion’s repeated assertions that Dimona served civilian purposes, the president demanded the Israelis halt their efforts, even threatening to re-evaluate the whole relationship. Because of Lee Harvey Oswald, that confrontation never happened.
While Lyndon Johnson attempted to leverage American military exports to coax Israel into signing a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, he ultimately let the issue slide. Golda Meir and Richard Nixon finally arrived at an informal understanding in a 1969 meeting in Washington. The American president agreed not to impede Israel’s weapons ambitions, so long as the program remained opaque–meaning, no testing of weapons and no public announcement of them.
So began the enshrinement of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, endorsed by all subsequent American presidents, Barack Obama included. In the years that followed the Nixon-Meir agreement, Israeli leaders repeatedly declared the country “would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region.” To enforce this pretense, the government avoided all public discussion, even in the Knesset. Censorship laws also prohibited wider talk of these weapons....
Read entire article at The New Republic
Should Jerusalem bring its bomb out of the basement? Israel, for at least the moment, is the sole possessor of atomic weapons in the Middle East, with an arsenal that now includes approximately 200 warheads. But it is also the only nuclear-armed nation to hide its cache behind a façade of official silence–neither confirming nor denying its existence....
Having won its War of Independence in 1948, Israel looked out at a daunting strategic landscape. Surrounded by adversaries with growing military capabilities, Israel had only a modest military force of its own. It had also failed in its efforts to enter into a military alliance with either Europe or the United States. And, with lingering fears that the Holocaust might repeat, David Ben-Gurion latched onto the notion that nuclear weapons would provide the ultimate security blanket.
Without resources to move forward on its own, the Jewish state aggressively cultivated France, which had fired up its first research reactor in 1948 and, soon after, invited scientists from Israel’s Weizmann Institute to collaborate on nuclear research. By 1953, Israel and France entered into a formal agreement on nuclear cooperation. Following the Suez crisis, that relationship grew even closer. With Paris’s help, around 1963, Israel opened its own reactor in Dimona, a remote corner of the Negev desert.
Washington wasn’t pleased. It was obsessed with curtailing the spread of the bomb. And, by the end of the Eisenhower administration, it began raising questions about the Dimona facility. Those questions fell to President Kennedy, who would make the lone serious effort to halt the Israeli program. Unconvinced by Ben-Gurion’s repeated assertions that Dimona served civilian purposes, the president demanded the Israelis halt their efforts, even threatening to re-evaluate the whole relationship. Because of Lee Harvey Oswald, that confrontation never happened.
While Lyndon Johnson attempted to leverage American military exports to coax Israel into signing a nuclear nonproliferation treaty, he ultimately let the issue slide. Golda Meir and Richard Nixon finally arrived at an informal understanding in a 1969 meeting in Washington. The American president agreed not to impede Israel’s weapons ambitions, so long as the program remained opaque–meaning, no testing of weapons and no public announcement of them.
So began the enshrinement of Israel’s policy of nuclear ambiguity, endorsed by all subsequent American presidents, Barack Obama included. In the years that followed the Nixon-Meir agreement, Israeli leaders repeatedly declared the country “would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region.” To enforce this pretense, the government avoided all public discussion, even in the Knesset. Censorship laws also prohibited wider talk of these weapons....