Sleepwalking With the Bomb (26 page)

After Israel won its initial war of survival in 1949, Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, began thinking about developing nuclear weapons. Before he left office, a tectonic political event occurred to make the question of nuclear weapons more urgent: the 1952 Free Officers coup in Egypt, which brought the charismatic pan-Arabist, pro-Soviet Gamal Abdel Nasser to power.

After a botched covert operation discredited the Israeli government (the affair, which partly aimed at getting rid of Nasser, involved Israeli agents clandestinely bombing
two U.S. buildings in Cairo
), the 69-year-old Ben-Gurion took up office again in late 1955. He entered into the Atoms for Peace commercial nuclear program, but also began a clandestine effort to develop a weapon.

On July 26, 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal and closed it, cutting off the only short sea transit route from Europe to Asia. Britain and France, among those who relied on the canal to save months of shipping transit time for cargo from Asia, allied themselves with Israel to topple Nasser. Their plan was to invade the Sinai Desert. British and French forces would seize the Suez waterway, blockade key Egyptian ports, and conduct aerial bombardment. They would give Nasser an ultimatum: withdraw from the Suez Canal Zone or lose power.

In too-clever-by-half timing, the momentous, ill-starred operation began October 29, one week before the American presidential election. America was supposed to be distracted by its upcoming presidential election and surely would not oppose the takedown of a virulently anti-American, charismatic Arab demagogue and Soviet client. Instead, on November 6, the day of his landslide reelection, Eisenhower condemned the operation.

In a bizarre coincidence that compounded Eisenhower’s fury at the three allies, Hungarians were in the midst of a revolt against Soviet rule. Eisenhower was utterly impotent in the Hungarian crisis. Russian artillery took commanding heights and tanks rumbled in the streets of Budapest, against which Hungarians had small arms, virtually no artillery, no tanks, and at best “Molotov cocktails”—bottles filled with kerosene and lighted with a wick, tossed at Russian armor and Soviet buildings. Moscow brutally suppressed the revolt on November 10.

Eisenhower’s impotence in Hungary was not replicated in the Mid-east, and his decision to sandbag key allies was fateful and disastrous for the West. On November 8 the Soviets warned the British, French, and Israeli invaders to pull back or else face retaliation. Strategic bombers armed with nuclear weapons backed their threat. Had it been hit by three Russian hydrogen bombs, the State of Israel would have virtually ceased to exist. And the Soviets had the power to inflict upon England and France vastly greater devastation than did the Germans in World War II.

The three countries were left to fend for themselves against the Soviets because Eisenhower feared losing support in the Arab world if he allowed the invasion to proceed. And as superpower guarantor, via NATO membership, to Britain and France (it was not until 11 years later that America and Israel entered into a formal alliance), he did not want to be drawn into a possible nuclear confrontation with Russia.

Without U.S. support, and only Britain armed with nuclear bombs—few, at that—the three countries had no practical choice but to capitulate to the Soviets.

On November 30, 1956, the frustrated France and Israel made their first nuclear weapons development pact. The next year, the French agreed to help Israel build a nuclear plant at Dimona, in Israel’s Negev Desert.

The French-Israeli nuclear collaboration lasted only until May 1960. Charles de Gaulle ended it shortly after he returned as president of what remains today France’s Fifth Republic. But the work went on, and Israel made a clandestine deal for heavy water, used to produce nuclear fuel, from Norsk Hydro, a huge Norwegian company.
⁴⁰
In December 1960, on the cusp of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Israel’s program became public knowledge. Kennedy pressed Israel hard to allow inspection of its Dimona facility, but Israel resisted. In an April 2, 1963, Oval Office meeting, Israel’s then-Deputy Foreign Minister, Shimon Peres, offered Kennedy what was to become the permanent formulation for Israel as to its nuclear program: Israel would not be the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. (The key word is
weapons
, which Israel clearly restricts to meaning a
fully assembled weapon
. Having components that can be rapidly assembled into a bomb does not qualify as actually introducing weapons under this formulation.)

The Dimona reactor began operation—in nuclear parlance “went critical”—in December 1963. Ironically that same year Nasser was helping to midwife the Palestine Liberation Organization, which would come to pose an existential terrorist threat to Israel’s future, one not anticipated by Israel’s focus on a nuclear deterrent.

Sometime between December 1963 and the June 1967 start of the Six-Day War, Israel completed all the steps necessary to rapidly assemble a nuclear device. (The time needed to assemble a usable bomb is short. Final assembly of the primitive Nagasaki implosion A-bomb in August 1945 took less than one day. Assembling a gun-trigger device would be even quicker.) Two prototype devices may have been ready for use in 1967, during the Six-Day War. By then Lyndon Johnson was president and looking to run again in 1968. With a close election expected in the fall, the Jewish vote took center stage, and New York’s then-45 electoral votes were crucial. Johnson told his staff with the plain-speak he was known for: “Good nonproliferation policies lead to bad politics.”
⁴¹

T
HE TURN
at Suez proved among the most catastrophic miscalculations in American foreign policy history. In condemning Nasser’s enemies and allowing Nasser to proceed unchecked, the United States tossed away the chance to crush Nasser and nip pan-Arabism in the bud. In 1958, the radical passions Nasser stirred up in the Arab world bore ugly fruit, with Egypt-sponsored revolution in Iraq, soon followed by revolution in Syria. These uprisings brought a pair of secular militarist tyrannies to power and destroyed French and British influence there.

These revolutions destroyed what was left of the power of pro-Western moderates. Along with the 1963 founding of the Palestine Liberation Organization, these events set in motion a cascade of Mideast calamities over the ensuing decades. Had the United States used its superpower status to protect the interests of its close allies in 1956, these calamities—briefly described below—might have been avoided entirely, or at least, their impact blunted.

On New Year’s Day 1965 the PLO launched its first attack against the Jewish state—one aimed at “liberating” not the West Bank, then occupied by Jordan, or Gaza, then under Egyptian suzerainty, but Israel, from democratic Jewish status. While the Palestinians had chafed under Arab rule few outside the region had cared. Nor had there been serious international talk about their “national historic rights.”
⁴²

But Nasser’s post-Suez decade of agitation against Israel’s right to exist (a point of view then held unanimously by Mideast Arab countries) led to the Six Day War, and that changed Palestinian politics. It was only when Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza after the 1967 war that the plight of the Palestinians became a staple of international politics.

Suez ended the brief alignment between Britain, France, and Israel.
⁴³
Britain and France never fully recovered from their shattering defeat at Suez. Britain, pro-Arab, rarely was a close ally of the Jewish state, and France became beholden to Arab oil until nuclear power changed its energy equation.

France also allowed a refugee from Iran, one Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to take shelter in the late 1970s. From there he sent audio-tapes into Iran to supporters. They were played to public audiences in mosques, urging revolution against the Shah. Syria, after a 1970 coup, turned more extreme under Hafez al-Assad. The Assad family was to become radical Iran’s prime surrogate ally in Mideast politics, and a client of the Russians. A Mideast Stalin, Saddam Hussein, brutally seized power in Iraq in 1976.

Then came the fateful year of 1979, when Khomeini established his fascist clerical regime with global revolutionary aspiration, and the Great Mosque seizure led the Saudis to start surreptitiously subsidizing Sunni Islamic extremists around the globe. Islamic Jihad, an al-Qaeda precursor, assassinated pro-Western Egyptian reformer and Arab-Israeli peacemaker Anwar el-Sadat in 1981. Financing the spread of radicalism were petrodollars taken from the West, at grossly inflated cartel prices. Iran, for its part, used petrodollars in 1982 to found Hezbollah, as formidable as any terrorist group in the world today. Iran also funded terror attacks by various Palestinian groups around the globe. And as the Soviet Union’s decade-long Afghan war wound down in 1989, Osama bin Laden founded al-Qaeda.

Thus did the events of 1954–1967 set in motion a cascade of calamities for the West, with a nuclearizing Iran now poised to become the greatest catastrophe of all in the world’s most volatile region, one riven with instability, violence, tyranny, and terror, and seated astride the economic lifeline of the West.

The post-Suez disasters came from a common predicate: America’s failure to use its superpower status to protect the interests of its close allies—interests the U.S. shared, had its leaders grasped the stakes. An American failure to prevent Iran from joining the nuclear club will pose similar dangers. Those who believe we can rely on traditional deterrence are wrong. America’s allies in the Mideast are not confident that the United States can protect them from a nuclear Iran.

As former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Feisal has strongly hinted, Saudi Arabia will pursue nuclear weapons if Iran goes nuclear—that is, Iran’s crossing the nuclear weapon threshold “would compel Saudi Arabia… to pursue policies which could lead to untold and possibly dramatic consequences.” Under the circumstances, pursuit of nuclear weapons is understandable, just as it was understandable when David Ben-Gurion decided that only Israel could be trusted to safeguard its own security, a principle to which Israel has adhered ever since.

The latest manifestation of this principle is Israel’s refusal to bow to pressure from the Obama administration concerning a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Israel has refused to accept that it requires American approval for such a strike, partly because it reserves, as does any sovereign nation, the strategic prerogatives of
raison d’etât
(“reason of state”) and
ultima rati
o (“last resort”); President Obama recognized these prerogatives in public. But his administration serially leaked information, some of it classified, in a transparent effort to undermine Israel’s case for striking, and to raise the political cost to Israel of acting without administration approval. Thus Israel does not trust the U.S. to back it up diplomatically in the aftermath of a strike, let alone believe that the Obama administration is truthful in asserting that the military option is on the table. Whether Israel’s viewpoint is correct is beside the point. Because Israel believes that it cannot fully trust its ally to give full diplomatic support, it cannot commit to informing its superpower ally before acting.

A similar solicitude for Western security interests would have led the United States to back the Suez operation, bring down a tyrant aiming to upend all pro-U.S. regimes, and hand the Soviets a major regional defeat. To this day we are suffering the baleful foreign policy fallout from the debacle at Suez.

And thus the Eighth Lesson of nuclear-age history: A
LLY
P
ROLIFERATION CAN BE PREVENTED ONLY BY SUPERPOWER CONSTANCY
. This lesson applies not only to America’s allies, but to other present, former, and aspiring nuclear-club powers. China did not fully trust its super-power guarantor, the USSR, even before their 1962 split made China’s crash nuclear weapon program inevitable. Neither India nor Pakistan had a superpower guarantor, nor, truly, does nuclear aspirant Iran. (South Africa and Libya were pariahs, and North Korea remains one.)

A continued restraining influence upon prospective proliferators can only be effectively exercised by a nuclear ally. Such a partnership extends a nuclear guarantor’s deterrence umbrella to cover states considering an independent deterrent. An American failure to sustain extended deterrence on behalf of its allies in the Mideast will reverberate around the globe. It will not be lost on nuclear-capable allies of the U.S. such as Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Burgeoning regional arms races are a recipe for accelerating the advent of nuclear conflict.

__________________

37.
Future prime minister Harold Macmillan also stated during the 1955 debate in the House of Commons that Britain might wish to use tactical nuclear weapons in the Middle East or in Asia.

38.
However, it is far from clear that nuclear bombs would have been effective against widely dispersed forces. Like Afghanistan today, Vietnam simply did not have the kind of concentrated targets that make nuclear weapons effective.

39.
France tested its last weapon in 1996 in the final series by a Western country.

40.
It was Norsk Hydro that during World War II manufactured heavy water for the Nazis. The Allies so feared the prospect of a Nazi bomb that they destroyed the factory and later, after centrifuges were replaced, sank a ferry carrying heavy water as it began a journey to Germany. Fifty-three civilians were on the ferry, some of whom drowned. The story is told in the suspenseful 1965 action film
The Heroes of Telemark.