That same month, in an oft-repeated refrain in the annals of nuclear proliferation, Bergmann told the U.S. Ambassador to Israel,
Israel wanted to go forward immediately towards the development of atomic power because of the desperate need for power in Israel due to the impossibility of securing oil from the Middle East. He stated that the Israeli universities had most adequate courses in physics, had made a start in chemistry, were far behind in engineering, and their system of education in metallurgy was nonexistent. He stated that Israel was now producing uranium from phosphates and was producing heavy water, both in small quantities. They had devised what they thought was an original reactor which utilized a core of enriched materials and a blanket of natural uranium, plus heavy water. . . . They had discovered that basically their reactor was the same as the U.S. design for the Shippingport reactor. . . . He recognized this reactor would produce a small amount of plutonium.62
The italicized words in this quotation denote areas that Israel and NUMEC later adopted as areas of mutual interest and cooperation. Also of note is the fact that Zalman Shapiro was involved in significant ways with design and construction of the Shippingport reactor. Bergmann went on to indicate to the Ambassador that he wanted to get an American reaction to this plan.
Bergmann also discussed with AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss the need to train Israel chemists to work with the new elements, including plutonium. Strauss responded, “You could not do anything that would provide you even the slightest quantities of plutonium.” Nevertheless, Bergmann persisted with his secret plan to design a reactor that would produce small quantities of plutonium and to hide that fact from the Americans. Amos deShalit, the head of nuclear physics at the Weizmann Institute, opposed that approach and particularly Bergmann’s intent to deceive the Americans. “We should forget about submitting a plan which does not indicate the real purposes. . . . It is evident the issue cannot be snuck in through talk about fissile products, power plants, etc.” Ben-Gurion sided with de Shalit and secretly approached the French for help with his dream of an Israeli nuclear arsenal.63
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In April 1956, Bergmann and several others, including Scientific Counselor Victor A. Salkind of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC, visited the AEC’s offices on H Street in downtown Washington, DC to meet with AEC’s division of international affairs. The Israelis said they were seeking aid for a nuclear research reactor to be fueled by natural uranium produced in Israel. They also requested research quantities of enriched uranium. They claimed to hold an advanced technological position in the atomic field and a wish to “skip over” experimental reactors. That is, they wanted something bigger than an experimental reactor, something they could put to productive use, not just conduct tests. They also discussed the offer by President Eisenhower to give Israel $350,000 to support construction of a research reactor.
The Israelis also requested training in reactor operations, control of radiological hazards and metallurgy of reactor components. The U.S. attendees at the first meeting expressed reservations over the metallurgy question because “certain aspects of this field are still classified.”64 Metallurgy would prove to be key in Israel’s relationship with NUMEC.
After this introductory meeting, the Israeli delegation toured the United States and contacted a number of AEC laboratories and private firms engaged in nuclear activities. Before going home, the Israelis returned to AEC headquarters to report the results of their meetings and to request further assistance from the AEC staff. Dr. Bergmann told his AEC hosts that his group had “fruitful” visits to “various Commission installations.” He reiterated that Israel was planning to build a natural-uranium, heavy-water-moderated reactor. He said they had given their specifications for such a reactor to a number of American firms and expected to receive bids in a few weeks. He expressed again his interest in obtaining heavy water and U-235 from the U.S. for experimental purposes. During the discussion, the Israelis said they had been in contact with various American firms in connection with fabrication of fuel elements for their reactor. Hal Bengelsdorf of the AEC recorded the minutes of the second meeting.65 Bengelsdorf was involved with nonproliferation matters while working for the AEC and after he retired from government service.4
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The record of that second AEC staff meeting with the Bergmann entourage does not list the people or companies the Israelis contacted. Since Zalman Shapiro was a leading American metallurgist and by then a person of growing influence among American Zionists, perhaps Bergmann met him or even recruited his assistance during that first official visit to the United States.
Shapiro later said he developed a special relationship with Bergmann. He told Hersh that Bergmann “was a genius. He was a genius’s genius. He worked night and day. I don’t know when he slept.”66 By 1965, Shapiro and Bergmann were serving together on the Board of Directors of ISORAD, a joint venture company organized by the IAEC and NUMEC for various radiological enterprises in Israel.
If Bergmann recruited Shapiro during the Israeli’s first official visit in 1956, it probably signaled Israel’s return to the approach of the Sonneborn Institute of the late 1940s. The so-called Institute was a secret federation of millionaires that financed arms shipments to Israel at Ben-Gurion’s request for the fledgling Israeli nation. Perhaps the Israelis began in 1956 to apply the approach used in the 1940s to recruit arms assistance from abroad, only this time the objective was to obtain assistance for their nuclear weapons program from experts in the United States.5 Officials in the CIA would later come to that point of view and concluded, “Shapiro was a consultant to the Israeli AE program in 1960 or earlier.”67
The most important supporter of Shapiro in founding NUMEC was David Lowenthal. Lowenthal was connected with the Sonneborn Institute as part of his service with the ship Exodus in the late 1940s.68 By 1956, he lived next door to Shapiro in suburban Pittsburgh and would likely have introduced the two men at that time of Bergmann’s first visit in 1956. Lowenthal and Shapiro founded NUMEC in 1957.
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Later in 1956, Bergmann formally requested AEC to sell heavy water to Israel. His request went to AEC Chairman Lewis Strauss. He said the heavy water would be used in a 10-megawatt natural uranium reactor.
On December 4, the AEC staff met with Dr. Ephraim Lahav, another scientific counselor of the Embassy of Israel. He inquired about the status of a reply to Bergmann’s letter concerning heavy water. He said that the Israelis had chosen a site for their reactor and asked about getting two Israeli scientists into a training program. He also requested permission to visit Oak Ridge National Laboratory (one of the sites at which AEC enriched uranium) and Argonne National Laboratory (AEC’s lead laboratory for development of reactor technology). The AEC staffers replied that Chairman Strauss and the Israeli Ambassador had resolved the question of heavy water (the U.S. would not supply it) and that they would be glad to look into the training matter and to arrange the visits that Dr. Lahav requested.69
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In 1957, Israel accepted the 1955 offer by the United States to supply a specific research reactor under the Atoms for Peace program. Construction soon began at Nahal Soreq, a few kilometers south of Tel Aviv where the Soreq River meets the Mediterranean Sea. The reactor was a five-megawatt-thermal, pool-type reactor. Its fuel was enriched uranium (about six kilograms of U-235 per core), and light water served as its moderator and coolant.70 A U.S. company, American Machine and Foundry (AMF), constructed the reactor. AMF was a nuclear weapons contractor for the U.S. AEC and constructed the first nuclear reactors in Pakistan, Iran and a dozen other countries.
Ironically, AMF also was in the food irradiation business with the U.S. Army, a business that NUMEC claimed to covet in Israel.71 The joint venture company ISORAD, which was the creation of Shapiro and Bergmann, included food irradiation among its commercial offerings. Notably, nowhere in the records of Bergmann’s early meetings with U.S. AEC officials was there any mention of food irradiation.
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Operations at the Nahal Soreq reactor began in June 1960. Scientists from the Weizmann Institute have conducted industrial, medical and scientific experiments in the reactor since then. Under terms of the supply contract, the U.S. had inspection rights to ensure that Israel did not divert nuclear materials from Nahal Soreq to weapons uses.72 In April 1965, Israel agreed to let the U.S. transfer responsibility for inspections at Nahal Soreq to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in return for the U.S. supplying another 40 kilograms of “enriched uranium, under safeguards, for Nahal Soreq’s research program.”73 The IAEA has inspected the safeguarding of the nuclear fuel in the Nahal Soreq reactor since that time.74 The Nuclear Threat Initiative reports that from 1960 to 1966, the U.S. supplied a total of 50 kilograms of enriched uranium as fuel for the reactor.75 There have been no reports of releases of radioactivity from Nahal Soreq.
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The Nahal Soreq research reactor was too small to satisfy Israel’s quest for sizeable quantities of plutonium. Therefore, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Minister of Defense Peres and IAEC Chairman Bergmann undertook discussions with French atomic energy officials to make the same request they had made of the Americans. They asked for assistance in obtaining a heavy-water-moderated, natural-uranium fueled reactor. At the same time, the Israelis began discussions with Norway to acquire heavy water.
France and Israel had cooperated in a conventional arms deal (jets, tanks, artillery) after a 1955 Soviet-sanctioned arms deal between Czechoslovakia and Egypt. Egypt had been supporting anti-French forces in Algeria, so France sought to strengthen Israel’s military to counterbalance Egyptian strength in the region. In addition, the Israelis provided intelligence to France on the Algerian rebels. Then, in return for Israel’s assistance in resolving the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, the French agreed to supply the reactor sought by the Israelis.
In his Battling for Peace: A Memoir, Peres said he reached an agreement with the key French officials for them to supply a reactor at a secret meeting in France where Israel, Britain and France adopted a mutual assistance strategy for rolling back the Egyptian occupation of the Suez Canal. Professor and historian Avner Cohen said the French officials apparently did not inform French President Charles de Gaulle about the nuclear aspects of the agreement even though they knew that the reactor would be used in a nuclear weapons program.76 The deal solidified when the United States threatened to intervene in the Suez Canal Crisis, which forced British, Israeli and French forces to pull out of the confrontation. The American interference apparently was the last straw for France, which accelerated its nuclear weapons program soon thereafter.
Within a year, in late 1957, the French kept their end of the nuclear bargain with Israel by formalizing arrangements to begin construction of a reactor and plutonium processing plant in the Negev desert near a settlement known as Dimona. In early 1959, American U-2 spy planes photographed excavations at the Dimona site. One of CIA’s top interpreters of aerial photos, Dino Brugioni, realized the Dimona excavations and site arrangements were similar to nuclear facilities at Marcoule, France that had been built a few years before. When CIA briefers informed President Eisenhower of this discovery, “he showed no interest and asked no questions.” When further U-2 flights and more photographs showed construction of the Dimona reactor proceeding as the CIA predicted, the White House continued to ignore the project. Brugioni recalled that the Eisenhower Administration was sympathetic to Israel’s plight, being surrounded by Arab nations bent on its destruction. He recalled the prevailing attitude: “Whenever you get something on the Israelis and you move it along, you’d better be careful, especially if you’ve got a career.”77 Avner Cohen recently published an update of his thinking on who first discovered the existence of Dimona. He apparently agrees that Brugioni was the first.78
The Dimona reactor design derived from the French EL-3 reactor, which employed slightly enriched uranium fuel and heavy water for cooling and neutron moderation. The Dimona site had a co-located plutonium extraction facility similar in layout to the French plutonium production facilities at Marcoule. Various reports put the initial thermal power rating of the Dimona reactor at either 24 or 40 megawatts. The plutonium production rate for a 40-megawatt Dimona reactor was said to be 10 to 15 kilograms per year.79 Others say that by the late 1970s the Dimona reactor had a thermal power rating of 70 megawatts and could produce 40 kilograms of plutonium a year.80 Israeli superspy Arnon Milchan told his biographers, and the Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu told the press that the reactor later had a 150-megawatt thermal power level, which would provide with an even higher plutonium production rate.81
Dimona
In 1958 Charles de Gaulle returned to power and learned of French involvement in the Dimona project. He soon required French workers to be withdrawn from the site. Minister of Atomic Energy Jacques Soustelle was a strong supporter of Israel and curbed de Gaulle’s orders.82 Andre Finkelstein, former director general of the French AEC, told Cohen a somewhat different story.83
When de Gaulle came back to power he wasn’t so much against Israel but he wanted to make peace in Algeria so he had to make something to appease the Arabs and he said we have to stop that project [Dimona] immediately. The orders came from Paris, you have to get rid of all the personnel in your company. . . . The same day the Israelis started another company and took back all the same people to finish the project. Even under de Gaulle it could be done!”
The possibility that France might abandon the Dimona deal, or that Dimona’s plutonium production might be delayed, surely incentivized Israel to consider alternative sources of fuel for the reactor and alternative, near-term sources of fuel for its ultimate goal, the bomb.
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In 1958, two Israelis conducted separate visits to British nuclear installations. They were the director of the Dimona project and the head of the research and development authority in the Ministry of Defense. A military attache in the Israeli Embassy in London, Yuval Ne’eman, arranged the visits. Ne’eman was studying in London for his doctorate in physics. A brief memo in the British Foreign Office asked “Why is Israel interested in nuclear power?”84
In April 1959, an unidentified source leaked to the British Embassy in Tel Aviv part of a speech by Defense Minister Shimon Peres at the Weizmann Institute three months earlier. Peres alleged that Amos de Shalit’s research at the Institute was “a surfeit of theory” at a time when Israel was “developing secret weaponry.” Intrigued by this turn of phrase, British Ambassador Patrick Hancock arranged a dinner with Meyer Weisgal, president of the Institute. Weisgal “let his tongue run loose” and told the ambassador about the debate raging within Israel over the development of the bomb. Hancock passed this information along to the American naval attache in Israel who cabled it to Washington in May. The CIA asked the American military attache in Tel Aviv to substantiate the report independently. When he failed to do so, CIA labeled the information as dubious.85
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In 1959, Norway agreed to supply Israel with heavy water that Norway owned and had stored in the United Kingdom. Israel needed the heavy water to cool and moderate the reactor at Dimona. At that time, U.S. AEC officials were informed of the deal, but they were also told that the final design of a heavy water reactor was uncertain.86
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On February 13, 1960, in the Sahara Desert in Algeria, France tested its first nuclear weapon. It was a plutonium implosion device and had a yield of about 70 kilotons of TNT, making it the largest ever first-test atom bomb (America’s first test of an atom bomb at Trinity had a yield of about 20 kilotons). Before the test, Israeli scientists and engineers looked over the shoulders of their French counterparts in reactor operations, plutonium production and weapons design. Authors Reed and Stillman, whose book chronicled the political history of the bomb and its proliferation, apparently drawing on the words of French investigative journalist Pierre Péan, quipped that two nations went nuclear with that one test.87 Israeli journalist and author Mic
hael Karpin said Israel based the design of its first atom bomb on the French design tested in Algeria.88
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In August 1960, an American woman serving as a secretary in the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv accompanied her Israeli boyfriend on an automobile tour of the Negev. They drove by the Dimona facility. The boyfriend told her the French were building a nuclear reactor and introduced her to some Frenchmen that were working at the site. She told her boss at the embassy. He cabled the information to Washington. Once again, CIA attached no importance to the report.
In September, Bergmann met in Vienna with Lawrence B. Hall, assistant general manager for international affairs of the U.S. AEC. Hall was a commissioned officer in the U.S. Public Health Service. Bergmann told him that Israel was building a reactor and was eager to accumulate stocks of uranium to fuel a reactor and extract plutonium. Hall took two months to report the conversation to the head of AEC’s intelligence organization.
In late 1960, agencies of the U.S. government finally received undeniable evidence that the French were building a reactor in Israel. A nuclear physicist from the University of Michigan, Dr. Henry Gromberg, described the project to officials of the CIA and the State Department during a debriefing upon his return from a consulting assignment in Israel.89 Such debriefings of U.S. scientists after their travels to foreign countries have been a long-standing practice of the CIA and the State Department. Richard Helms noted that these activities were conducted by the Contacts Branch of CIA’s Intelligence Division and were primarily overt debriefings of business people and others who travel to areas of strategic interest. He also said that this is a practice followed by most of the world’s intelligence services and foreign policy establishments.90 Federal employees and contractors that traveled internationally for AEC and NRC were accustomed to friendly debriefs by the CIA. Shapiro may have had similar debriefings after his foreign jaunts because of his Q security clearance.
Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel Page 5