This account benefits from the few CIA documents that have been released. For example, CIA prepared National Intelligence Estimates pertaining to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The Agency later released some of those Estimates in redacted form. In addition, officials that saw the originals have described in open literature the major conclusions of the classified Estimates. The CIA also prepared reports and Intelligence Estimates about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and released those documents in redacted form, including some that involve Israel. This is the first account ever to utilize other CIA documents about NUMEC obtained recently through appeals to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel and through the Federal courts.
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A brief recounting of the first few years of the Atomic Energy Commission provides a useful backdrop for the NUMEC story. In August 1945, when two atom bombs ended World War II, few other countries had the knowledge to develop nuclear weapons. Because of their work with the Manhattan Project, both Britain and Canada knew how to make a bomb but had no facilities for producing weapons-grade uranium or plutonium. The Soviet Union stole bomb designs and fabrication methods from Los Alamos Laboratory during the Manhattan Project and was hard at work soon after the war to produce plutonium to replicate the Nagasaki bomb.
After the war, the United States, Canada and Britain asked the United Nations to establish controls for atomic energy. They proposed mechanisms to provide other countries with scientific information on peaceful applications of nuclear technology in exchange for forbearance by those countries in the development of nuclear weapons.
In 1946, Congress passed the Atomic Energy Act to create a Federal government monopoly of nuclear energy and to give control of that monopoly to an independent Atomic Energy Commission or AEC. The primary tenent of the Act was to require civilian control over atomic energy by vesting authority in five civilian commissioners drawn from a cross section of political affiliations. The Act gave first priority to military applications of atomic energy and lower priority to research on civilian uses of atomic energy.
The 1946 Act required the federal government to own all radioactive materials and the facilities to produce them. All commissioners and staff of the AEC were required to have a Q security clearance that provided access to Restricted Data, the classification accorded to information involving design, manufacture or use of nuclear weapons. Most information about the production and utilization of special nuclear material or SNM (plutonium, enriched uranium, and other materials used to make a nuclear weapon) was classified. The organization of the AEC included an executive officer called General Manager who reported to the commissioners and managed the staff of the commission.44
In the 1946 Act, Congress also created a Joint Committee on Atomic Energy QCAE or Joint Committee) to provide oversight of the new AEC. It was one of the few committees ever established by statute rather than rules of the respective houses of Congress. The JCAE had exclusive access to the information upon which its deliberations were based, including classified information not available to other committees of the House or Senate. The isolation and protection of information made the JCAE one of the most powerful Congressional committees in history.45
The Joint Committee had nine members from each house, with no more than five from one political party, and an executive director. The 1946 Act required the AEC to keep the Joint Committee “fully and currently informed with respect to the Commission’s activities.” Congress generally accepted what the Joint Committee decided on atomic energy matters from 1946 until 1977. In early 1975, implementation of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 divided the duties of the AEC between two new agencies, the NRC and the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA). A reorganization of the Senate abolished the Joint Committee on August 5, 1977.
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Near the end of 1947, the AEC began to reorganize the complex of laboratories and production facilities of the Manhattan Project. The AEC continued to produce plutonium at the Hanford Engineering Works in Washington State. It continued to enrich uranium at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and later added uranium enrichment facilities in Paducah, Kentucky and Portsmouth, Ohio. Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois became AEC’s center for power reactor development. Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory continued to be the center for development of nuclear weapons. In 1949, AEC created Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory in Pennsylvania to support AEC’s naval nuclear propulsion group.
In 1947, the AEC had 4,700 government employees and 50,000 contractor employees. By 1952, the enterprise grew to 6,700 government and 136,000 contractor employees.46 The disparity between government and contractor employees owed to a decision to continue the reliance placed by the Manhattan Project on scientists, engineers and technicians provided by private industry. This approach afforded private companies access to the technical fundamentals of atomic energy that were then still classified. It also led to a system of management of the AEC’s facilities that was highly decentralized.47
In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first atom bomb. Klaus Fuchs and others at Los Alamos facilitated that achievement by spying for the Soviets, then allies of the Unites States, on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Their espionage cut years off the lead-time that American officials had estimated for the Soviets’ atom bomb program and soon led to a decision by President Truman to build the more powerful and destructive hydrogen bomb.
When Dwight Eisenhower became president in 1952, the AEC’s empire was continuing to expand. Time magazine reported, “The AEC controls a land area half again as big as Delaware—and it is growing more rapidly than any great U.S. business ever did. Its investment in plant and equipment ... makes it bigger than General Motors Corp.”48
By December 1953, the United Nations had made little progress in implementing the proposals made by Britain, Canada and the U.S. for controls on the spread of nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the United States was seeking to quell fears of the nuclear age by counterbalancing its shift from conventional to nuclear arms with peaceful uses of atomic energy. To those ends, President Eisenhower delivered his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations. His primary objective was to establish and maintain American superiority in atomic energy, an important strategy in the Cold War, while providing countries without nuclear materials a means to benefit from nuclear power without acquiring nuclear weapons.49
Ike proposed that the “governments principally involved” should make joint contributions from their stockpiles of natural uranium and fissionable materials to an international atomic energy agency under the aegis of the United Nations. The agency would be responsible for “impounding, storage and protection” of those materials for distribution to member states for peaceful applications. The new agency also would be responsible for dispersing information supplied by the advanced nations about peaceful applications of atomic energy.50
Consistent with Eisenhower’s proposal of Atoms for Peace, Congress passed an amendment of the Atomic Energy Act in 1954 that permitted the exchange of nuclear materials, equipment and information with other countries for peaceful uses of atomic energy under conditions to be specified in formal bilateral agreements with each country. In the next three years, AEC established bilateral agreements with about twenty countries.
Pursuant to the 1954 Act, AEC required that the materials, equipment and information provided under such agreements should be subject to safeguards, including inspections by U.S. personnel, to verify their use for peaceful purposes. The first bilateral Agreement for Cooperation was signed with Turkey on April 28, 1955. On May 25, the commission approved agreements with Colombia, Brazil, Israel, Spain and the Philippines. Eleven more agreements were consummated in early June.51 Israel’s agreement to cooperate under the Atoms for Peace program belied the secret intentions of some of its leaders to resist international oversight of their nuclear weapons ambitions.
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America conducted its first t
hermonuclear test in 1952, on the island of Enewetak in the South Pacific, and the Soviets, again aided by espionage, followed suit less than a year later.52 Competition with the Soviets led the AEC to ramp up its manufacturing of weapons by developing additional production facilities, such as the tritium and plutonium production facilities at the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina, while slowing down the development of commercial nuclear power and the declassification of information needed to stimulate industrial participation.53
On October 1, 1955, AEC issued its first license for a privately owned nuclear reactor, a research reactor at North Carolina State College. In 1956, AEC issued its first construction permits for commercial nuclear power plants, the Indian Point plant near New York City and the Dresden plant near Chicago. That same year, AEC issued its first contract under the Power Reactor Demonstration Project to help Yankee Atomic Electric Company construct a nuclear power plant in Rowe, Massachusetts.
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The AEC’s initial emphasis on accountability procedures for SNM reflected the strategic value of fissionable materials in nuclear weapons. The government expended billions of dollars during World War II to produce a few kilograms3 of highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium and did not want to squander its investment. Therefore, the government initially owned and accounted for all of these rare and valuable materials. As the supply and value of SNM changed, the emphasis on accountability changed to reflect the perception that “business prudence dictates prevention of loss or diversion of dollar-significant quantities. . . .”54
The amendment of the Atomic Energy Act in 1954, which allowed SNM to be held but not owned by private industry, led AEC to strengthen controls over SNM. It tasked its Division of Source and Special Nuclear Materials to review at least annually the effectiveness with which AEC managers monitored SNM distributed to private industry. In 1954, the commission also established a Division of Inspection to gather information on how well contractors and licensees complied with the provisions of the Act.
A management review by the Division of Inspection in 1955 found that the basic system for contractor control of SNM was sound. That system delegated responsibility for control of the materials to their physical location. Nevertheless, in 1956, the commission issued new regulations on controls to be exercised for SNM held by its licensees. They required licensees to maintain measurement and record systems for transfers and inventories and to reimburse the commission for any loss of or damage to SNM, such as dilution of the enrichment of HEU. The regulations did not impose details on the accountability systems since financial responsibility for the material was thought to be adequate to prevent theft, and any licensee guilty of unlawful diversion (nuclear parlance for theft) was subject to criminal sanctions prescribed in the 1954 amendment of the Act.
In 1957, the AEC replaced its Division of Civilian Applications with the Division of Licensing and Regulation. In 1959, the commission appointed an Assistant General Manager for Regulation and Safety with responsibility for inspecting AEC’s licensees holding SNM. By then, commercial facilities had been built and were being licensed to serve all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle, shown in the following table.
Nuclear Fuel Cycle
Mine uranium ore
Mill and leach ore to extract uranium oxide and produce yellowcake
Process yellowcake to produce uranium hexafluoride (UF6)
Enrich U-235 content of UF6
Process UF6 to uranium dioxide (U02) and fabricate fuel elements
Use the fuel elements in a nuclear reactor
Dispose used fuel or reprocess it to remove plutonium and uranium
Make new fuel from reprocessed plutonium and uranium
In 1959, AEC began to require annual surveys to demonstrate that local controls of SNM were effective. These surveys included the first third-party inventories of SNM. The details about which records and measurements should be used were left to the individual contractors that held SNM at specific locations. Any unresolved inventory differences involving a suspected violation of law were required to be reported to the FBI.
In 1961, the commission established the position of Director of Regulation thereby separating the developmental and the regulatory functions of AEC. In 1962, Stanford Research Institute (SRI) completed a study of the efficacy of regulatory controls of SNM. It concluded, “Neither the current nor the suggested improved system would always reveal significant diversions of source [material] and SNM at any point in the system.” The commission undertook improvements because of the SRI study.
In 1964, the Private Ownership Act allowed sale of SNM to private entities while maintaining the government’s control of SNM for health, safety and security purposes. The Act gave AEC authority to license ownership, import and export of SNM. The AEC issued standard measurement methods for plutonium and uranium in 1964. AEC continued to apply its policy that financial responsibility for the loss or damage of SNM would prevent its diversion. The NUMEC affair soon demonstrated AEC’s naiveté.
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1 The National Security Act of 1947 created NSC as the president’s principal forum for considering national security and foreign policy matters with his senior national security advisors and cabinet officials. Thirty years later, it was closely informed of the NUMEC affair.
2 In the intelligence trade, FBI officers are referred to as agents or special agents and spies that FBI controls are called informants. CIA operations personnel are called officers or case officers while agents are spies in CIA parlance.
3 In this book, material weights are stated in kilograms, abbreviated kg. For readers who prefer English units, a kilogram equals 2.2 pounds.
Chapter 2
Israel’s Nuclear Genesis
In a radio broadcast on May 15, 1948, David Ben-Gurion announced the creation of the State of Israel. As its first prime minister, he vowed to use science and technology to ensure that the Jewish people would never be as helpless as they were in the Nazi Holocaust. He said science and technology had two roles in the realization of Zionism—to advance the nation of Israel spiritually and materially and to provide defense against its enemies. His vision included atomic energy. He wrote in 1948, “We are living in an age of scientific revolutions, an era that discloses the atom, its miraculous composition and the tremendous power hidden in it.” Ben-Gurion also wrote, “What Einstein, Oppenheimer and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States could also be done by scientists in Israel for their own people.”55
In 1952, after the death of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, Ben-Gurion offered Israeli citizenship and its presidency to Albert Einstein. In declining the offer, Einstein cited old age as a factor (he died three years later) and noted, “my relationship to the Jewish people has become my strongest human bond, ever since I became aware of our precarious situation among the nations of the world.”56
The other two virtuoso physicists cited by Ben-Gurion consulted with him on other occasions. In 1952, the prime minister hosted Oppenheimer and Teller for several hours at his home in Tel Aviv. Although this was the first of only two reported meetings between Ben-Gurion and Oppenheimer, it was the start of a 20-year relationship of Teller’s with Ben-Gurion and leaders of Israel’s nuclear program.57
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Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh called Ernst David Bergmann the Israeli Oppenheimer, the scientific father of the Israeli bomb. Born in 1903, the son of a rabbi, Bergmann was a refugee from Nazi Germany and a brilliant organic chemist. He met Chaim Weizmann in London in 1933 and helped him establish the Daniel Sieff Research Institute in Palestine in the 1930s with funding from the Sieff family in Britain. The Institute attracted other scientists fleeing the Nazis. During World War II, Bergmann and Weizmann developed production techniques for synthetic rubber to aid the allied war effort. By 1946, the Sieff Institute had become the Weizmann Institute of Science. In the late 1940s, the Institute established a radioisotope research department. It als
o sent young scientists abroad to study nuclear energy and nuclear chemistry. It established a relationship with the French Atomic Energy Commission and developed means to make heavy water and to extract uranium from phosphate mined in the Negev desert.58
Bergmann attracted Ben-Gurion’s attention and became a faithful protege and trusted confidant of the elder statesman. However, Bergmann’s relationship with Weizmann reportedly soured when the two clashed over the Institute’s role in military research and Weizmann’s wife learned of Bergmann’s philandering. In July 1951, Bergmann left the Institute to become scientific advisor to the defense minister. In 1952, Ben-Gurion appointed him the first chairman of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC).59 In 1953, Ben-Gurion appointed 30-year-old Shimon Peres as director general of the Ministry of Defense. Bergmann’s IAEC reported to Peres. Although Bergmann and Ben-Gurion talked a lot about nuclear power’s ability to “make the desert bloom,” Hersh said, “Nuclear power was not Ben-Gurion’s first priority; the desert would glow before it bloomed.”60 The triumvirate of Ben-Gurion, Peres and Bergmann drove the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
In July 1955, the United States offered to supply a research reactor to Israel. The offer included a $350,000 grant to defray expenses of the project, pursuant to Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace program.
A month later, Bergmann wrote a classified report about the First International Conference on Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy, which the United Nations convened in Geneva, Switzerland. Bergmann’s report articulated his vision for the future of the Israeli nuclear program and included his idea of secretly extracting plutonium from the Atoms for Peace reactor. His report also recommended making “all efforts to get as much assistance as possible from the United States, in both information and material; this effort needs to be made as early as possible, for political considerations may influence the American response to our request.” Bergmann also recommended accumulating the quantities of thorium and uranium that “will be needed for our future plans.”61
Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Page 4