Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

by Roger Mattson

  46 For further information about Avraham Hermoni, including the text of the interview that Cohen conducted with him in 1992, see “Avner Cohen’s Collection” at https://www.wilsoncenter.org/avraham-hermoni.

  Chapter 19

  Toward a Deeper Understanding

  The 50-year history of NUMEC is replete with denial and deception. Facts have been hard to come by. The ubiquitous need to know, the closed doors of meetings, the classified records of investigations and the redactions of sources and methods have veiled the truth and created a mystery. The foregoing account attempts to unravel the mystery with what is known.

  The main reason for going to the trouble to lay out what is known in some semblance of order, including facts published for the first time, despite the confusion created by piecemeal and protracted releases of information, is to ensure that the essential features of the story are not forgotten. Nuclear technology, like all human endeavors, should strive to avoid past mistakes.

  The central lesson from the foregoing account is that whether the diversion of HEU and the transfer of sensitive technology happened or not, they clearly could have happened. If the proliferation of nuclear weapons is to be slowed or halted, the lessons learned from the NUMEC experience must be heeded. More than that is needed, of course, but it would be tragic if these lessons have to be relearned.

  ***

  It is tempting to stop here, put the NUMEC story aside and move on. However, there is more to be harvested from the experience. Extended consideration of the matter leads to deeper understanding in several areas. This chapter briefly summarizes three of those areas, as follows:

  1.The NUMEC experience shows that dual loyalties make the control of nuclear weapons technology harder than normal.

  2.The Israeli policy of nuclear opacity impedes progress towards a nuclear-weapons-free Middle East.

  3.Arbitrary secrecy blocks citizens’ rights and abilities to assess their government’s actions.

  Dual Loyalties and the Control of Nuclear Technology

  America is home to bright foreign students from all over the globe, enjoying greater freedoms, ethnic diversity and Internet access than anywhere else. They earn scientific degrees, invaluable experience and standing in their technical communities, including the nuclear community. The same kinds of people no doubt train and reside in Belgium, Brazil, Great Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Italy, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Pakistan, Russia, Sweden, Taiwan and Ukraine, to name a few. These and other nations have access to the technology that underlies nuclear medicine, nuclear power and nuclear weapons. As they are able, most of these nations and others less developed will choose to utilize nuclear medicine, many will opt to use nuclear power and some will choose nuclear weapons. The spread of the technology cannot be stopped. It has already happened. The basics are on the world-wide-web, while the specifics are well within the capabilities of highly skilled scientists from most nations in the world, all of them born and raised in the era of globalization. No nation that seeks nuclear weapons will be thwarted by the unavailability of willing physicists. In fact, history teaches that some of these people will consider their homelands as sacred havens even as they enjoy the abundance of the technologically advanced nations. Human nature and statistics guarantee that dual loyalties will arise. When they do, answers blur to the question of what is the right thing to do.

  Victor Gilinsky pointed out that scientists like to see their ideas work in the real world, like some scientists from the Manhattan Project who cheered the successful bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He quoted Herb York, former director of Livermore National Laboratory, to the effect that it is difficult to control the spread of nuclear weapons because those devoted to pursuing them are mostly sincere people acting in good faith. They believe in what they are doing, and many of their predecessors became famous for their efforts in many different countries, not just America and Russia.743

  Realization of this vulnerability led to a common saying about nuclear technology, “The genie is out of the bottle.” It symbolizes a way of looking at nuclear proliferation, i.e., we cannot go backwards—once human beings learn how things work, they cannot unlearn them. Furthermore, it is good to try but impossible to completely secure knowledge with barbed wire and encrypted computers. People talk and the walls have ears.

  Former FBI Director Louis Freeh described his frustrations in dealing with white-collar crime, including the theft of trade secrets, with American laws that are decades out of date compared to the rate of change of technology.744 He said a surprising number of the Bureau’s cases involve foreign governments, including American allies, who direct their intelligence services at American trade secrets so that companies in other countries might gain competitive advantage. He said that FBI identified forty-three nations that were engaged in such activities using their embassies in the United States as a base of operations. What Freeh describes for America could easily apply to any technologically advanced nation. What he describes for ordinary technology is troublesome enough, but realizing that it also applies to nuclear technology is sobering.

  Human frailties, dual loyalties and wide dissemination of scientific capabilities have contributed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The trend will continue. The best America can do to control the future is to (1) be vigilant in thwarting unauthorized transfer of nuclear technology and materials while incentivizing other nations to do the same, (2) exert a civilizing influence on the global uses of nuclear energy to advance medical technology and to power economic development, and (3) rely on a kind of international detente until sanity leads to further progress on nuclear disarmament. Following that path, the highest priority is for America to demonstrate, by policy and deeds, its restraint, honesty and moral character in international nuclear affairs. That posture is a certain prerequisite to worldwide elimination of nuclear weapons.

  Nuclear Opacity Impedes a Nuclear Weapons-Free Middle East

  All sides of the nuclear arms race in the Middle East know about Israel’s nuclear weapons and America’s assistance in their creation, despite Israel’s determined maintenance of its policy of nuclear opacity. A 1987 report by the Pentagon-funded Institute for Defense Analysis provides an example of the cooperation between American and Israeli weapons designers. Israeli journalist Michael Karpin said the 386-page report exposed “for the first time ever the actual depth of top-secret military cooperation between the U.S. and Israel, including, amazingly, information about Israel’s unacknowledged nuclear program. . . . The most surprising segment in the report states that the Israelis are ‘developing the kind of [computer] codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs.’ In practice, this short expression confirms that in the eighties, Israeli scientists were reaching the capabilities to employ hydrogen fusion, possibly creating the sort of bombs that are thought to be a thousand times more powerful than atom bombs.”745

  As described in the foregoing chapters of this book, American assistance to the Israeli bomb program was not limited to the NUMEC case or to intergovernmental cooperation. It is now clear that people like Rafi Eitan, Avraham Hermoni and Shimon Peres recruited people like Arthur Biehl, Raymond Fry, David Lowenthal, Arnon Milchan, and Zalman Shapiro to support their program. Even though such assistance occurred in the past, it undermines current American efforts to convince governments in the region to forego weapons of mass destruction. In fact, American aid to Israel’s weapons program and America’s failure to address the threat the weapons pose create incentive for Israel’s neighbors to go nuclear.

  In 2007, John Mearsheimer, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt a professor of international relations at Harvard, described this effect in their best-selling book on the Israel Lobby,746

  The irony is hard to miss: the United States has pressured many other states to join the NPT, imposed sanctions on countries that have defied U.S. wishes and acquired nuclear weapons anyway, gone to war in 2003 to prevent Iraq fr
om pursuing WMD, and contemplated attacking Iran and North Korea for the same reason. Yet Washington has long subsidized an ally whose clandestine WMD activities are well known and whose nuclear arsenal has given several of its neighbors a powerful incentive to seek WMD themselves.

  In 2014, Victor Gilinsky addressed the need for telling the truth about the Israeli weapons. He cited a March 2013 statement by U.S. Ambassador to the IAEA Joseph Macmanus to a meeting of the IAEA board of governors on “Establishing a Middle East WMD-Free Zone.”747 Macmanus said, “The United States regrets the issue of Israeli nuclear capabilities has once again been brought before the Board. Unlike other Member States whose nuclear activities are included in this Board’s agenda, Israel has broken no agreements under the purview of the Agency.” Such statements, although “just within the truth” as Gilinsky noted, surely destroy U.S. credibility and cry out for truth telling.

  U.S. complicity in sustaining Israel’s policy of nuclear opacity and its refusal to join the NPT is unabashed. In September 2015, the general assembly of the IAEA voted against a resolution advanced by Egypt and presented by Qatar calling for international monitoring of Israel’s nuclear facilities. The vote was 61 to 43 against with 31 abstentions. The United States voted against the resolution, which called on Israel to join the NPT and to open its nuclear facilities to UN inspectors. Although the resolution called Israel’s nuclear arsenal “a permanent threat to peace and security in the region,” it did not call for dismantlement of that arsenal, only its monitoring by the IAEA as it does for all other acknowledged weapons states, including the United States and Russia. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s office called the vote to defeat the resolution “a great victory for Israel in the international arena.”748

  There is another example of America’s unabashed complicity in the policy of nuclear opacity. On September 8, 2015, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an article by nuclear nonproliferation scholar Leonard Weiss entitled “Flash from the past: Why an apparent Israeli nuclear test in 1979 matters today.” The article concerns “a likely Israeli-South African nuclear test over the ocean between the southern part of Africa and the Antarctic” called the “Vela Incident” because its first detection owed to a U.S. satellite by that name. In the article, Weiss presented a strong technical analysis, aided by data from national laboratories, to demonstrate that the test involved an Israeli nuclear device and was aided logistically by the South Africans. He also presented a convincing explanation of the political situation that led to a coverup of the test by the Carter Administration, a coverup that endures to the present time. That is, imposing sanctions on Israel would lead to the loss of Jewish supporters for Carter and the Democratic Party. On the other hand, “ignoring an Israeli nuclear test would make for a glaring case of a double standard in US non-proliferation policy.” Faced with this dilemma, the government concocted an alternative explanation, aided by distinguished scientists, to cast doubt on the validity of the data surrounding the test, and in some cases to suppress data provided by analysis underwritten by U.S. taxpayers. Over time, that counter explanation unraveled in various ways that Weiss explains in detail, leading him to conclude that Israel acted in violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty to which it is a party. Weiss’ bottom line is very similar to the one that emerged from this study of NUMEC, namely,

  Continuing to hide Israel’s testing violation is a direct counter to the US claim that it stands for the rule of law and implies that the United States cannot be counted on to defend treaties if they are violated by Israel. This failure fosters cynicism about the seriousness of the United States and its allies on the restraining of nuclear weapons. In the wake of the Iran agreement, it underscores concerns that the United States has double standards on arms control when Israel is involved.

  Arbitrary Secrecy Rules Violate Citizens’ Rights

  Why do the FBI and the CIA still hide truth about NUMEC when much of the truth is already known? What is left to hide? So much time has passed that the people who now guard the secrets have no personal stake in the history they hide. Many of the characters in the affair, its investigation and its coverup have died—Seaborg, Ramey, Teller, Hoover, Mitchell, Johnson, Nixon, Angleton, Duckett, Hadden, Helms, Shackley, Kennedy, Mason, Gossick, Giller, Starbird, Lowenthal, Bendor, Hermoni, Kafkafi, Bergmann, Ne’eman, Udall and Myers. Who is the U.S. government still protecting? Moreover, whether Israel jump-started its nuclear weapons program with HEU from the United States or not, its current nuclear weapons rely on its domestic production of fissile material. Plutonium production efforts at Dimona since the 1960s have trivialized any HEU diverted there from NUMEC. These are some of the reasons that telling the truth should not hurt.

  There are other reasons to know the truth. For one, the Army Corps of Engineers recently estimated that cleanup of the radioactive waste burial pits at Parks Township, the pits NUMEC exhumed in 1965 in a futile search for the missing HEU, will cost American taxpayers $350,000,000.00.749 It would be good for taxpayers to know what they are paying for and whether societal good owes to such costs.

  Thus, the overarching question is: Why are some aspects of the truth about NUMEC still being hidden by the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department? In addressing that question, it is useful to ask who would suffer the most damage if rumors and circumstantial evidence congealed into fact?

  ***

  Aspects of FBI’s performance in the NUMEC case helped to perpetuate its coverup. In May 1978, Congressmen Udall and Dingell were leading parallel investigations. Udall asked DOE for documents in its files that were authored by FBI and pertained to the case. In June, Assistant Attorney General Patricia Wald denied his request citing “the difficulty involved in disseminating information concerning a pending and active investigation.”750 Thus, FBI, with assistance from Justice and DOE, impeded two ongoing Congressional investigations, one by Udall and the other by Dingell. The FBI released those documents in the 1980s, but with heavy redactions. A few have been rereleased since then with fewer redactions. Most of the documents are still in heavily redacted form and essential features of the FBI’s investigations and collusions remain hidden from public view.

  CIA’s complicity in the coverup of NUMEC investigations is obvious by its continuing refusal to declassify key documents that are nearly 50 years old. Not so obvious is CIA’s misuse of the labor and integrity of U.S. citizens to accomplish its operations and protect its secrets. Consider the example of Edwin Kintner, an engineer who trained at the Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, served in the naval nuclear program and became a senior staff member of the AEC in the 1960s and 70s.751 In the naval nuclear program, at Bettis Laboratory, he participated with Zalman Shapiro in designing the reactor for the world’s first nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus. After leaving the Navy, Kintner participated in at least two U.S. inspection teams sent to Dimona, one in 1968 and one in 1969. In both cases the inspection teams failed to find the reprocessing facility at Dimona used for producing plutonium.

  In January 1994, well after Mordechai Vanunu,47 Hersh and others publicly declared that Dimona had been producing plutonium for nearly three decades, Avner Cohen and MIT professor Dr. Marvin Miller interviewed Kintner about his 1968 and 1969 inspections.752 When they told Kintner that the CIA knew of the reprocessing facility at Dimona before his inspections he was shocked.

  You know what, it seems to me that there was a lot of super-spy kind of things being dreamed up here. Let me . . . say again, I have no doubt that the Israelis had the intelligence and the capability and particularly the operation of the reactor to generate a lot of plutonium. I have no doubt they had the technology associated with separating that plutonium out into weapons grade material. But I have a very large difficulty in believing is that, as carefully as we were able to go around that facility, that processing wasn’t done there. Now maybe it was done somewhere else, but once more let me tell you that the satellite photography which was shown us . . . and we spent several d
ays at the CIA, it may be true that the CIA was not giving us the whole story either. If that’s the case then this country is in serious trouble. Why would they do that? Let me just make one other point. The President of the United States gets an agreement that states such a study will be made and the CIA on its own decides to not give what it knows to the people who are sent over there. Doesn’t that sound strange?

  Cohen summarized the Kintner interview.

  It appears that Kintner and his team were duped twice: once by the Israelis and once more by the U.S. intelligence agencies that did not share all they knew with the visiting team. In retrospect, it may be that the true function of the visiting technical teams was more political than technical, unbeknownst to the inspectors. . . . Their job was not to verify that what the Israelis were saying was true, but rather they were to be the technical fig leaf for the political facade that Israel was not crossing the nuclear threshold.

  Cohen’s rendition of the duping of Kintner is reminiscent of NRC’s duping of the Conran task force. Generalizing from these two experiences, it is safe to say that our government not only keeps essential facts from its citizens, it also uses it citizens as unwitting foils in perpetuating its coverups.

  ***

  What Gilinsky and I said in our second article about NUMEC in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is a good place to leave this subject of unreasonable security, realizing however that the need for truth telling extends well beyond NUMEC. Democracy does not work when the state unreasonably denies information to its citizens.

  Nearly 50 years have passed since the events in question. It is time to level with the public. At this point it is up to the president himself to decide whether to declassify completely the NUMEC documents, all of which are over 30 years old. He should do so. We know that is asking a lot given the president’s sensitivity about anything involving Israel, and especially anything relating to Israeli nuclear weapons. But none of his political concerns outweigh his responsibility to tell the US public the historical truth it deserves to know.