By Amir Oren
Last update - 10:27 07/08/2009
Courtesy Of Haaretz NewsPaper
Had things worked out just a little differently, an American Jew who took part in the bombings of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have helped found the State of Israel and served in the Israeli air force. It didn't happen because the man, a flight radar specialist, decided to stay in America.
His name was First Lieutenant Jacob Beser, and after he returned from the Hiroshima mission he was assigned as reinforcement for the second mission, which was supposed to bomb the city of Kukura. When Kukura turned out to be shrouded in haze, Beser persuaded the mission commander not to cancel the mission altogether but to drop the last American atom bomb on the secondary target, Nagasaki. Until his death in 1992 Beser continued to believe in the rightness of these bombings, which saved both sides what would have been hundreds of thousands of dead in a brutal invasion of the Japanese islands.
In August 1985, on the 40th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, an Israeli journalist located Beser at his home in Maryland. Beser said he had never been to Israel, even to visit his relatives, the Harlap family of Rehovot. When he was assigned to be a secret partner to the Manhattan Project, he was eager to take part in a bombing of Nazi Germany to avenge his family's annihilation in the Holocaust. At the end of the war, when he arrived at the army discharge base, he saw a recruitment table for the Haganah, which was looking for air crews to smuggle displaced Jews from Europe to Palestine. He thought about it, but decided not to sign up.
Nuclear ambiguity, often portrayed as a unique Israeli invention, is only a local version of a worldwide phenomenon. The Manhattan Project was characterized by obfuscation. Until Hiroshima, the Americans concealed the program's existence and development. After Nagasaki, they kept another big secret - they had no more atom bombs left. All nuclear nations employ ambiguity to one extent or another.
The deliberately ambiguous phrasing regarding Israel's nuclear capabilities - "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East" - is generally attributed to Shimon Peres. It is thought to have been a quick linguistic improvisation by Peres, then the deputy defense minister, in the absence of an opportunity to check with prime minister David Ben-Gurion, at a surprise meeting at the White House with president John F. Kennedy in April 1963. But if the Atomic Energy Commission were to institute an annual International Nuclear Ambiguity Day, it would probably have to be set to commemorate November 4, 1968, and the actions of Yitzhak Rabin.
Nuclear Independence
That week, Israel won its war of nuclear independence. In 1948, president Harry Truman recognized Israel over the objections of cabinet secretaries George Marshall and James Forrestal. Twenty years later Clark Clifford, who as Truman's adviser was helpful to Israel, was the secretary of defense who opposed Israeli nukes. So did Secretary of State Dean Rusk, but President Lyndon Johnson eventually overruled them.
The fascinating saga is chronicled at length in previously classified State Department documents. Two officials with the rank of undersecretary, Paul Warnke from the Pentagon and Parker Hart from the State Department, tried to make the sale of 50 Phantom fighter jets contingent upon Israel forgoing nuclear weapons and surface-to-surface missiles. Warnke and Hart enlisted the support of Clifford, Rusk and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow, hoping that the lame duck Johnson - who was waiting to see who would triumph in the November 5 election, his vice president Hubert Humphrey or the Republican candidate Richard Nixon - would press Israel to give in and become a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, thus giving Johnson something to leave behind as a positive legacy of his presidency, so badly bloodied by Vietnam.
In the deal, according to the documents, Warnke set down four tough conditions for Israel: It shall not deploy or attempt to deploy strategic missiles without prior warning and American consent, it shall not manufacture or acquire strategic missiles and nuclear weaponry without prior warning and American consent; it must accede to semi-annual inspection (Israel insisted on the term "visits") at certain sites, including Dimona, and it shall supply full information regarding any plan to obtain nuclear capability, and sign and ratify the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
Johnson, who promised prime minister Levi Eshkol in principle to sell him the Phantoms, continued to ponder the decision as Eshkol's illness reached the terminal stage (he passed away four months later). Eshkol, said reports from the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, is politically weak as well. If he gives in on the nuclear issue, he'll be portrayed as a spineless prime minister not to be trusted on matters of security and will lose the chance to make progress in the indirect (and occasionally also direct) talks with Egypt and Jordan.
After the election, the victor, Nixon, refused to help Johnson compel Israel to join the non-proliferation regime. Israel's Judgment Day weapon, the analysts said, was a guy named Abe Feinberg, a friend of Johnson, who persuaded him to shelve the conditions for the Phantom sale. In fact, two coups were achieved at once: For the first time, Israel would be receiving an advanced American fighter jet (the Skyhawk, the model that preceded the Phantom, was inferior to it), and Coca-Cola, which Feinberg obtained the license to manufacture here. Rabin, at the time Israeli's ambassador to the U.S., led the Israeli team in the talks with Warnke. Also present were Shlomo Argov, his deputy at the embassy in Washington; Major General Mordechai Hod, the air force commander; and Brigadier General David Carmon, the military attache.
The only surviving Israeli participant from those meetings is Yaakov Shapira, who headed the Defense Ministry delegation in New York. Shapira recalls a serious and positive atmosphere. Rabin, infused with the authority of having been chief of staff during the Six-Day War, was blunt and "brutally" assertive, according to an internal administration report. At the height of one clash, Rabin reportedly stated, "We did not come here to mortgage the sovereignty of the State of Israel."
What, exactly, is nuclear weaponry? How is it "presented" in an arena? When does a missile become strategic? (Rabin: "When its range covers Arab capitals.") The only explicit commitment by Israel, copied from the Skyhawk to the Phantom, was not to use the American jets to carry nuclear weapons.
Israel's representatives honed, by way of negation, their interpretation of nuclear weaponry: a nuclear device already tested and publicized. If these two conditions did not hold, then Israel at least (a stricter approach had to be taken toward a country with the declared intent of destroying Israel) had no nuclear weapons. To this end, Rabin relied on his military expertise, his natural skepticism and his acquaintance with Israeli industry and its political patrons: A weapons system is not deserving of the name unless it has passed testing.
The purpose of nuclear weaponry in the hands of the superpowers, said Rabin, is, as everyone knows, deterrence. Israel, on the other hand, was seeking to achieve deterrence by means of surface-to-surface missiles, in order to dissuade Egypt, which was arming itself with such missiles equipped with explosive, or possibly chemical and biological warheads, from using them against population centers and disrupting the call-up of reserves.
Arab Rationalism
The answer suggested by Warnke to the deterrence argument was quoted in a memo to Clifford, under the heading of "cases and responses." If Rabin were to say that Israel believes nuclear weaponry and strategic missiles can deter Arab states from hostile actions, Warnke should respond that the American administration anticipates a completely different, and disastrous, consequence: Soviet nuclear missiles in Egypt and perhaps other countries as well.
Here, Warnke added: Israel's theory of missile and nuclear deterrence will not work in the Arab context, because "it ignores the Arabs' unstable and irrational nature. We believe, based on experience, that such deterrence can work only if the other side is capable not only of rational analysis, but also of ongoing rational action, in particular during times of rational pressure. We know, and Israel knows, that neither the Egyptians, the Syrians or the Iraqis are known to demonstrate such rational thinking and behavior and we cannot be confident that they will be able to do so for decades to come."
Warnke was mistaken. The Soviets did react to the deep bombings in Egypt, and to the Phantoms that Johnson approved and Nixon supplied, by setting up an array of surface-to-air missiles near the Suez Canal, by manning MIGs to intercept the Phantoms and by installing Scud missile batteries (which were used against the IDF in the Yom Kippur War), but they did not deploy any nuclear weapons; and Anwar Sadat proved that he was quite capable of rational thinking. His working assumption, when he came to Jerusalem, was that in the absence of testing or publication even Israel still possessed a nuclear weapon as a last line of defense. He was not about to put this theory to the test.
In the 1970s and '80s, the Soviets appeared to be unfazed by the frequent reports regarding Israel's supposed possession of nuclear weapons. Alexander Zotov, adviser on Middle East Affairs at the Soviet embassy in Washington, and later the Soviet ambassador to Syria, told Israel via a journalist: We do not care if you have really developed a new version of Jericho missiles, as long as you do not aim them at us and control over them is not passed from the government to the IDF. The Russians hold the same view today.
While the Americans and Russians are trying to reduce the number of nuclear warheads in their arsenals from tens of thousands to just a few thousand, and eventually a few hundred, the time of reckoning for the medium-size and smaller nuclear nations is fast approaching. First they will be required to conduct an inventory and institute a freeze; then they will have to reduce their number of weapons to a minimum, if not to zero.
The Iranians, for instance, rationally or not (as Warnke would have it), do not wish to find themselves facing Iranian-like Israelis. What would happen if Israel were to be ruled by fundamentalist clergy not of the mild Shas variety, and the Revolutionary Guards in Jerusalem had at their disposal the strategic weapon Israel is purported to possess; and what if, in the event of a governmental collapse, someone were to steal a missile or a bomb and threaten to strike Islam's holiest sites, including the Ka'aba in Mecca?
The Department of Defense and the Department of Energy in Washington are investing billions of dollars in strengthening the security of dozens of U.S. sites, manufacturing plants and trains, lest nuclear materials and warheads disappear. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was in Israel last week, began his military service in the 1960s as a junior intelligence officer in the air force's Strategic Air Command, giving briefings on ICBMs. Now he's restoring that department to its former glory.
In 1986, as head of the CIA's research administration, Gates disseminated among the American intelligence community a detailed document analyzing the likelihood (low, in his view) of nuclear terror attacks by terror organizations. Left out of the analysis, at the decision of its authors, was a potential terror attack on a nuclear facility by a disgruntled worker. Fortunately for the reactor in Dimona and its employees, Mordechai Vanunu did not choose such a move, and stole a camera rather than a bomb. His documentation may or may not have dented the ambiguity, but it didn't kill anyone.
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