by Ari Shavit
The marathon began in Rehovot, where Dostrovsky’s team built the cumbersome Kleinschmidt apparatus that distilled heavy water in a unique process. The operation officer’s team brought phosphate rock from the Negev and developed various methods to extract uranium from it in vats of solvent. The distillation of water enriched with heavy oxygen (O18) was an immediate success. It turned 1950s Israel into one of the leaders in the field. But the uranium extraction was slow and arduous. Years of hard work yielded only a few grams. But both processes forged an initial capability in the field of nuclear research. Both aroused international interest and allowed Israel to enter international partnerships. In the laboratories of the Weizmann Institute, amid the orange groves, Israel acquired its nuclear foothold.
The first nuclear ties between Israel and France were brokered by Ernst David Bergmann in the late 1940s. In late 1956, Bergmann signed a preliminary agreement with the French to build a nuclear reactor in Dimona. Shimon Peres forged the diplomatic alliance on nuclear matters and the French signed the binding agreements in 1957. But the two young men who nurtured and deepened the ties with the French, the undercover scientific attaché Shalhevet Freier and the operations officer of Hemed Gimmel, received few accolades. Working directly with the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), these two energetic men gained the trust of the French and fostered a scientific, technological, and strategic intimacy between Paris and Rehovot. In 1956 and 1957 the operations officer made frequent visits to Paris, hammering out an agreement with the French that required each side to keep the other fully apprised of its advancements. In 1957, my host moved to France in order to study the most critical stages of the nuclear process, and in 1958 he received access to France’s holy of holies, its most advanced atomic facility. From that moment on, everything was open to him, everything revealed. After completing his military service, the young operations officer of Hemed Gimmel became the engineer in charge of the most sensitive and most secret part of the French-Israeli nuclear program.
In the winter when I was born, the action returned to Israel. Seven years after he went down to the Negev in a command car in search of uranium, the engineer again went down to the desert in a command car in search of the best location to build the French-Israeli reactor. The survey team included eight Frenchmen and two Israelis. The Israelis detested each other. The pedantic Colonel Manes Pratt, former Ordnance Corps commander and an engineer by profession, was in charge of building Israel’s Los Alamos, while the brash and sometimes impetuous engineer was to be responsible for the most critical part of the future installation. But at this point in the plot, both Israeli men were minor characters. The decision makers were the French. And when the command car convoy reached triangulation point 472 on the Rotem Plateau, the French concurred that this was the spot. The Israeli nuclear reactor would be built fourteen kilometers southeast of the town of Dimona.
According to the official agreements, the reactor was to have been a modest affair of the type EL-102, with an output of only 24 megawatts. But according to Avner Cohen, on the ground, the reactor that the French company Saint-Gobain built for Israel resembled the G1 reactor it had built in Marcoule for the French Republic. According to international publications, the output of the upgraded reactor in the desert was at least 24 megawatts. And according to those same publications, it included a secret plutonium separation plant that was not mentioned in the official agreements. I have reason to believe that during the three years he spent in France, the engineer probably took part in the planning of the most essential unit of the Israeli reactor. And during his frequent visits to Israel, he surely observed its construction. He may well have been the one who solved the severe problems that arose from the proximity of the separation plant to the reactor itself. Still, the engineer has no doubts about the matter: however significant his or Manes Pratt’s contributions might be, Dimona was France’s grand gesture toward Israel. It was the parting gift of a declining colonial power to the young frontier nation that the West erected in the East and was now leaving on its own.
Because of his intense rivalry with Manes Pratt, the engineer was not present in Dimona when the construction of the reactor was completed in 1961. And he was not present at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, as Dimona was officially known, when the French departed in 1962. Nor was he present when the reactor was activated and went critical at the end of 1963. In fact, during the first years of Dimona, the engineer watched from afar. But when he was appointed to the helm of Dimona in 1965, he discovered to his surprise that his most important work would be political.
By 1960, the United States knew that France was building a nuclear reactor for Israel on the Rotem Plateau. President John F. Kennedy was committed to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons and was staunchly opposed to the production of nuclear weapons in Dimona. According to an agreement signed between Israel and the United States, American inspection teams were allowed to visit the desert reactor once a year, beginning in 1962. On their first four visits, the Americans discovered nothing. But with every visit, Israel’s posturing became less and less convincing to the Americans. By 1965, according to Avner Cohen and others, Israel faced its most dramatic juncture.
The engineer does not tell me so explicitly, but it is clear: before he turned forty, the role of the son of an orange grower from Rishon LeZion was to deal with the Americans. His mission was to win them over—pleasantly, calculatingly, elegantly—so that Dimona could continue to function. And in order to achieve this goal, according to non-Israeli sources, simulated control rooms were built, the entrances to underground levels were bricked up, and pigeon droppings were scattered around some buildings in which the forbidden installations were housed to give the impression that they were not in use.
The Saturdays on which the Americans visited Dimona were tense and exhausting. The national leadership followed from afar every moment of conversation between the engineer and the inquisitive inspectors. Every moment was critical, any mistake could be fatal. But the engineer’s self-confidence and charm worked wonders. The March 1966 inspection passed without incident, as did the following inspection in April 1967.
But there was one last hurdle for the Israelis to overcome. Immediately after he was appointed president in 1958, Charles de Gaulle made it clear that he adamantly opposed the nuclear cooperation between Israel and France. In 1960, he ordered its cessation. But pro-Israeli French ministers allowed the completion of the construction work in Dimona in 1961 and 1962. Even in 1965, when de Gaulle became hostile toward Israel, the French-Israeli nuclear cooperation continued. As I now learn, without French raw materials and French technology, Dimona could not have functioned throughout the 1960s. Senior members of the French Atomic Energy Commission understood this. They felt obligated toward Israel because of the young state’s scientific contributions, because of the Holocaust, and because of the intelligence it provided on Algeria. Even those among them who were not Jewish believed that Israel represented a historical act of justice and regarded it as a Western bulwark in the East. The engineer’s dramatic task was to maintain the alliance with the professional leaders of the French nuclear project who defied their president in order to make Dimona possible.
I want to question the engineer about the final stage of the process, but I know he will not answer my questions about production directly. After so many years of adamant silence, he will not yield easily now. So I ask for another whisky. Outside the living room windows, evening descends.
In order to ease his way forward, I place in front of my host an almost inscrutable entry from the journal of Munia Mardor, the CEO of RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems. It was published in his memoir, but its significance was only noticed some years after publication by Aluf Benn of Haaretz and was later quoted by Avner Cohen in his book. It is dated May 28, 1967:
I went to the assembly hall.… The teams were assembling the weapon system, the development and production of which was completed prior to the war. The time was after midnight. Engine
ers and technicians, mostly young, were concentrating on their work. Their facial expressions were solemn, pensive, as if they fully recognized the enormous, perhaps fateful value of the system they brought to operational alert. It was evident that the people of the project were under tension, the utmost tension, physical and spiritual alike.
The engineer laughs. He knows what Mardor wrote, but he dismisses it out of hand. He won’t speak about Dimona’s decisive moment, but he will say something about Dimona’s spirit. “We never trembled with excitement, we never opened bottles of champagne. We were physicists and chemists and engineers who did what we were supposed to do, without dramatic flourishes or lofty words.”
Yet the race was not finished. On May 17, 1967, shortly before the Six Day War, two Egyptian MiG 21 jets made a brief high-altitude reconnaissance flight over Dimona, causing alarm in Jerusalem. The engineer had to take extraordinary steps to protect his unique project. But in the year following the war, the engineer faced his greatest technological challenge—and opportunity. Post-1967 Israel felt a sense of urgency because of the extinction fears that the nation experienced in the weeks prior to the war. But because of the decisive victory, post-1967 Israel also had a new sense of omnipotence. The outcome of this mixture of fear and omnipotence was technological chutzpah. According to Avner Cohen, during the engineer’s third year as director general of Dimona, the facility tripled its production capability.
After this success, and another, and a third, the engineer’s audacity knew no limits. Under his command, Israeli scientists, engineers, and technicians developed remarkable know-how. They turned Israel into a self-sufficient nuclear nation. No longer a French protégé or an American dependent, the Jewish state was now perceived worldwide as an advanced nuclear power.
And then there was the final stage of the process. The American inspectors’ visits of 1968 and 1969 passed without a hitch. Together with the physicist Amos de Shalit, the engineer would exhaust the inspectors and lead them astray and yet again manage to obscure the secrets of Dimona. But after the eighteen-hour inspection of July 12, 1969, Golda Meir changed tack and undertook a forthright dialogue with the Americans. Under the influence of Henry Kissinger, the United States also changed tack. In late September 1969, in a meeting between the newly elected U.S. president, Richard Nixon, and Prime Minister Meir, the United States and Israel reached an unwritten understanding concerning Dimona. The reactor on the Rotem Plateau had become a fait accompli, and the international community accepted and adopted Israel’s policy of opacity regarding its existence.
What interests me most is the event the engineer says occurred in December 1966. This was the moment in which, according to international publications, Israel assembled the first metallic sphere that could take out a city. Were there really no goose bumps? Did the hands not tremble? Was there really no sense that we had eaten the forbidden fruit? Did the engineer feel no fear or trepidation at all?
My host does not confirm or deny the relevant international publications. “But let’s say they are accurate,” he says, smiling. “What’s all the fuss? Isn’t it clear that Israel must defend itself? Isn’t it clear that Israel must deter its enemies? Someone had to do that job. Someone had to be at the Weizmann Institute in 1955 and in France in 1960 and in Dimona in 1966.”
It had to be done, so he did it. And he did what he did as best he could, helming one of Israel’s first high-tech enterprises. And this enterprise demonstrated Israel’s acumen and cunning and wherewithal, surpassing all expectations and guaranteeing Israel a half century of life.
As I glance up from my notes to the beaming face of the engineer, my first thought is of his murdered father. Though the murder occurred four years after the end of the Arab Revolt, the shooting in the orange grove in the spring of 1943 affected the engineer in the same way that the wave of violence of 1936–39 affected his generation. The murder turned him into a tough, formidable fighter bent on revenge. The spoiled and intellectually indifferent adolescent became a fearless soldier, free of inhibitions. He fought as commander of a Golani infantry platoon, as the operations officer of Hemed Gimmel, as an engineer in France, and as the director of Dimona. He invested his inner strength and his steely determination in the Jews’ national struggle for their land and against the Arabs. The obligation to guarantee the existence of Israel swept aside all other concerns. At every juncture the engineer had only one mission: To make sure the Jews would not die. To make sure that no enemy would rise up from the bush and fell them one fine spring morning.
My second thought is about the Arab villages the engineer destroyed in 1948. Even if he does not say so, it is clear that a straight line leads from those villages to Dimona. The expulsion of 1948 necessitated Dimona. Because of those dead villages it was clear that the Palestinians would always pursue us, that they would always want to flatten our own villages. And so it was necessary to create a shield between us and them, and the engineer took it upon himself to build that shield. We would not allow the Palestinian tragedy to jeopardize the monumental enterprise designed to end our own tragedy.
My third thought is about the engineer himself. The more I listen to him, the more I understand that he cannot delve any deeper. He does not possess Ben Gurion’s historical acuity, Amos de Shalit’s tragic insight, or Dostrovsky’s dialectical shrewdness. He truly does not comprehend the complexity of his actions, the problematic aspects of his deeds. He has no perception of the enormity and the horror of his accomplishments. He is possessed by a strong national imperative, an iron will, an impressive propensity for action. But he does not have the ability to see his life’s work in perspective. His ability to do is derived from his ability not to see the implications of his deeds.
My host looks at me quizzically, as if trying to read my thoughts. I answer his silent questions candidly. I tell him that his accomplishments are almost incomprehensible in scope. In the mid-1960s, Israel was a nation of 2.5 million people that nevertheless succeeded in acquiring for itself a capability that Germany, Italy, and Japan still do not have. Despite its small size and the difficult circumstances in which it existed, it was perceived as one of the six leading powers of the world. And it did not stop there. Immediately after crossing the threshold, according to international publications, it built an arsenal of dozens and dozens of nuclear warheads: A-bombs and H-bombs, low yield and high yield, nuclear artillery shells and nuclear mines. If even a fraction of what has been written over the years is true, I tell him, then we’re talking about a stupefying success. According to non-Israeli nuclear experts, even during the early years, when the engineer was in charge of Dimona, the facility in the desert succeeded in producing its wares not only with French separation technology but with an Israeli method. Those experts claim that with proven imported technology and with homegrown, novel technology, the scientific installation produced what no one imagined it could produce: an astonishing capability of mass destruction.
The engineer smiles. He neither confirms nor denies.
But the technological achievement is only part of the story, I say. No less astounding than Israel’s ability to build a bomb was Israel’s decision to act as if it did not have a bomb. In the beginning there were two schools of thought: those who believed in the bomb absolutely (like Moshe Dayan and Shimon Peres), who thought that national security could be based on the bomb, and those who opposed it absolutely (like Allon and Galili), who believed the bomb would ultimately endanger national security. But after the security seminar Ben Gurion conducted at a retreat on the shore of the Sea of Galilee in 1962, a synthesis of these two approaches emerged: a doctrine according to which Israel would be a nuclear power but would act is if it were not. This way it would not goad the Arabs or accelerate the nuclearization of the Middle East; it would not adopt a reckless and immoral security strategy. Concerning anything and everything nuclear, Israel would be much, much more cautious than the United States and NATO. Concerning anything and everything nuclear, Israel would be the responsible
adult of the international community. It would well understand the formidable nature of the nuclear demon and would keep it locked in the basement.
The engineer smiles with what seems to be appreciation of this analysis.
I go on. There is a third achievement that is just as important, I tell him. The Dimona decade (1957–67) is also the first decade of Israeli normalcy. It is not only physicists and nuclear engineers who travel to Paris in those years. Painters and sculptors study at the École des Beaux-Arts, writers and poets frequent Latin Quarter cafés. Returning to Israel, they bring with them Sartre, Camus, Brassens, Prévert, and a new individualistic spirit. So do their colleagues who travel to New York and London. Some are influenced by W. H. Auden, some by Philip Larkin, others by Andy Warhol. Tel Aviv becomes a city of cultural and artistic fervor in which young Israeli-born artists and writers rebel against old-guard Zionist edicts. In Kibbutz Hulda, young Amos Oz writes his first groundbreaking short stories. In Jerusalem, A. B. Yehoshua writes modernist novels expressing the voice of a new generation. While a French nuclear reactor is built in the Negev, Israel becomes a modern Western nation, in which “I” replaces “We.” There is a remarkable link between these two processes: Dimona is not only an expression of modernity and individuality but a facilitator of modernity and individuality. Under its new bell jar, the new Israelis can be more relaxed and less mobilized. They can be far more liberal and loose than they were before, and they can actually pursue personal happiness. Dimona enables the inhabitants of the Jewish national home to live relatively sane and full lives that are not fundamentally different from those of Western Europeans.