The fragile and faltering state of American democracy.
It’s Official: The Pentagon Finally Admitted That Israel Has Nuclear Weapons, Too
William Greider on March 20, 2015 - 10:56 AM ET
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(FEMA)
While
the Washington press corps obsessed over Hillary Clinton’s e-mails at
the State Department, reporters were missing a far more important story
about government secrets. After five decades of pretending otherwise,
the Pentagon has reluctantly confirmed that Israel does indeed possess
nuclear bombs, as well as awesome weapons technology similar to
America’s.
Early
last month the Department of Defense released a secret report done in
1987 by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis that
essentially confirms the existence of Israel’s nukes. DOD was responding
to a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by Grant Smith, an
investigative reporter and author who heads the Institute for Research:
Middle East Policy. Smith said he thinks this is the first time the US
government has ever provided official recognition of the long-standing
reality.
It’s
not exactly news. Policy elites and every president from LBJ to Obama
have known that Israel has the bomb. But American authorities have
cooperated in the secrecy and prohibited federal employees from sharing
the truth with the people. When the White House reporter Helen Thomas
asked the question of Barack Obama back in 2009, the president ducked.
“With respect to nuclear weapons, you know, I don’t want to speculate,”
Obama said. That was an awkward fib. Obama certainly knows better, and
so do nearly two-thirds of the American people, according to opinion
polls.
In my previous blog, “What about Israel’s Nuclear Bomb?”
I observed that the news media focused solely on Iran’s nuclear
ambitions but generally failed to note that Israel already had nukes.
That produced a tip about the Pentagon release in early February.
Yet
the confirmation of this poorly kept secret opens a troublesome can of
worms for both the US government and our closest ally in the Middle
East. Official acknowledgement poses questions and contradictions that
cry out for closer inspection. For many years, the United States
collaborated with Israel’s development of critical technology needed for
advanced armaments. Yet Washington pushed other nations to sign the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, which requires international inspections to
discourage the spread of nuclear arms. Israel has never signed the NPT
and therefore does not have to submit to inspections.
Washington
knew all along what the inspectors would find in Israel. Furthermore,
as far back as the 1960s, the US Foreign Assistance Act was amended by
concerned senators to prohibit any foreign aid for countries developing
their own nukes. Smith asserts that the exception made for Israel was a
violation of the US law but it was shrouded by the official secrecy.
Since Israel is a major recipient of US aid, American presidents had
good reason not to reveal the truth.
The
newly released report—“Critical Technological Assessment in Israel and
NATO Nations”—describes Israel’s nuclear infrastructure in broad terms,
but the dimensions are awesome. Israel’s nuclear research labs, the IDA
researchers reported, “are equivalent to our Los Alamos, Lawrence
Livermore and Oak Ridge National Laboratories.” Indeed, the
investigators observed that Israel’s facilities are “an almost exact
parallel of the capability currently existing at our National
Laboratories.”
The
IDA team visited Israeli labs, factories, private companies and
government research centers in Israel and relevant NATO nations (details
on NATO allies were redacted from the released version). On Israel, the
tone of the report was both admiring and collegial. “The SOREQ center,”
it said, for instance, “runs the full nuclear gamut of activities from
engineering, administration and non-destructive testing for
electro-optics, pulsed power, process engineering and chemistry and
nuclear research and safety. This is the technology base required for
nuclear weapons design and fabrication.”
The
IDA team added: “It should be noted that the Israelis are developing
the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That
is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and
macroscopic level.” So far, The IDA estimated, Israel scientists were
about where the US had been in the 1950s in understanding fission and
fusion processes.
The
report does not include a single declarative sentence that directly
states the taboo—Israel has nukes—but the meaning is obvious. For many
years, scholars and other experts have estimated that Israel has at
least 100 to 200 bombs, possibly more.
Some
of the IDA’s observations seem to hint at a copy-cat process in which
the US government either actively helped or at least looked the other
way while Israel borrowed or purloined technologies to establish a
parallel nuclear system that looks a lot like America’s. The IDA
document does not say anything, one way or the other, on the history of
how this happened. But critics of Israel and advocates for banning all
nuclear weapons have harbored suspicions for decades.
The
Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, Smith said, is pushing
another FOIA request aimed at the CIA, hoping to pry open long-secret
intelligence investigations about how Israel managed to get the bomb in
the first place. The institute is seeking disclosure of a CIA study that
supposedly investigated how quantities of uranium were leaked or
allegedly smuggled by Israeli agents from a Pennsylvania defense plant
to provide seed corn for the Israel bomb.
Smith
and others suspect that elements of the US government knew what
happened back then or may even have assisted the stealthy transfer. That
particular mystery was a hot issue back in the 1970s. It seems likely
to get renewed interest now that the pretense of official ignorance has
been demolished by release of the 1987 report.
However,
the IDA’s most powerful message may not be what it says about Israel’s
nukes but what it conveys about the US-Israel relationship. It resembles
a technological marriage that over decades transformed the nature of
modern warfare in numerous ways. The bulk of the report is really a
detailed survey of Israel’s collaborative role in developing critical
technologies—the research and industrial base that helped generate
advanced armaments of all sorts. Most Americans, myself included, are
used to assuming the US military-industrial complex invents and perfects
the dazzling innovations, then shares some with favored allies like
Israel.
That’s
not altogether wrong but the IDA report suggests a more meaningful
understanding. The US and Israel are more like a very sophisticated
high-tech partnership that collaborates on the frontiers of physics and
other sciences in order to yield the gee-whiz weaponry that now define
modern warfare. Back in the 1980s, the two nations were sharing and
cross-pollinating their defense research at a very advanced level.
Today
we have as a result the “electronic battlefield” and many other awesome
innovations. Tank commanders with small-screen maps that show where
their adversaries are moving. Jet pilots who fire computer-guided bombs.
Ships at sea that launch missiles over the horizon and hit targets
1,000 miles away.
I
had to read the report several times before I grasped its deeper
meaning. The language is densely technological and probably beyond
anyone (like myself) who is not a physicist or engineer. The researchers
reported on the state of play in electronic optical systems, plasma
physics, laser-guided spacecraft, obscure communication innovations and
many other scientific explorations that were underway circa 1987.
Finally,
it dawned on me. These experts were talking in the 1980s about
technological challenges that were forerunners to the dazzling
innovations that are now standard. I saw some of these new war-fighting
devices in the late 1990s when I wrote a short book on the post-Cold War
military struggling to redefine itself when it no longer had the Soviet
Union as an enemy (Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequence of Peace).
While
reporting on numerous military bases—land, sea and air—I saw some of
the early attempts at battlefield communications and guidance systems. A
lot of the new stuff didn’t work very well. Soldiers and commanders
sometimes had to put it aside or work around it. Drones at that stage
were still on the drawing boards, known as UAV’s—“unmanned aerial
vehicles.”
The
Middle East wars became the live-fire testing ground where new systems
were perfected. The consequences of peace were brushed aside by the
terror of 9-11. War became America’s continuous preoccupation.
Israel
participated importantly in developing groundwork for some of the
wonder weapons and, as the IDA survey makes clear, Israeli physicists or
engineers were sometimes a few steps ahead of their American
counterparts. To be sure, the Israelis were junior partners who brought
“technology based on extrapolations of US equipment and ideas.” But the
report also observed: “Much Israeli fielded electronic warfare and
communications [is] ahead of US fielded equipment.”
On
several occasions, the research team spoke of “ingenious” or
“Ingeniously clever” solutions that Israeli technologists have found for
mind-bending problems of advanced physics. The IDA team also suggested
opportunities for American researchers to piggy-back on what Israel had
discovered or to team up with one of their R&D centers. Yale’s
Office of Naval Research, IDA suggested, should collaborate with the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“Scientists
at RAFAEL [another Israeli center] have come up with an ingenious way
of using the properties of a glow discharge plasma to detect microwave
and millimeter waves,” the report said. “The attractiveness of the
project lies in the ability of the discharge to withstand nuclear
weapons effects.”
This
observation gave a me a chill because the earnest defense scientists
have yet to find a way for human beings “to withstand nuclear weapons
effects.”
It
would be good to keep in mind that these extraordinary breakthroughs in
technology have one purpose—fighting wars—and are intended to give
still greater advantage to advanced nations like the US and Israel that
dwarf more primitive adversaries. Many of the new technologies, it is
true, will find commercial applications that improve everyday lives
(some already have). Yet it is also true that our advances in high-tech
killing power have not subdued all the enemies.
They
find irregular ways to fight back. They blow the legs off our soldiers.
They plant home-made bombs in crowded restaurants. They recruit
children to serve as their guided missiles. They capture and slaughter
innocent bystanders, while our side merely bombs the villages from high
altitude. The victims do not see our way as pristine or preferable.
Their suffering becomes their global recruiting.
The
highly successful partnership of American and Israeli military science
is one more reason it will be most difficult to disentangle from the
past and turn the two countries in new directions, either together or
separately. But many people are beginning to grasp that lopsided
wars—contests between high-tech and primitive forms of destruction—do
not necessarily lead to victory or peace. They have led the United
States into more wars.
Read Next: William Greider on how Israel’s nuclear superiority affects Middle East conflicts
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