by Uzi Eilam
Without further ado we got down to the matter at hand and acting on Chaim Israeli‘s advice I offered a vivid description of the problems of switching horses in mid-race, while the R&D Unit was still on its way up. Gur had already discussed the matter with Peres and had made his arguments, and I could clearly see where the discussion was leading. It was at this meeting that Peres informed me that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wanted to meet with me about a future position which he did not specify. However, when Gur left the room, Peres asked me to stay and told me that Rabin was going to speak to me about heading the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, a position of great importance. “It’s a position for the rest of your life,” said the man whose name was associated more than anyone else with Dimona Nuclear Research Center and Israel’s nuclear program. I understood that the matter had already been decided, and I resolved to consider what the prime minister had to offer. If it seemed like a good proposition, we could set a time-table for the transition.
11
The Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC)
Rabin Makes an Offer
Brigadier General Ephraim Poran, the prime minister’s military secretary, called me to schedule a meeting with Rabin at the Prime Minister’s Office in Tel Aviv, early in September 1975. The Prime Minister’s Office was in a building constructed by the Templars, who built the German Colony of Sarona, located at the heart of the General Staff military base in the Kiriya. I was extremely curious when I came to meet with Rabin. I entered the room where Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister and defense minister, used to work when he was in Tel Aviv. Wasting no time, Rabin turned to me and in his deep, quiet voice said: “‘Uzi. You were recommended as a candidate to direct the Atomic Energy Commission. Are you willing to take on the position?’ Although I had already heard about it from Shimon Peres, I found myself momentarily speechless. I quickly regained my composure and told Rabin that in principle I agreed, but that I wanted to consult with a few people before giving him a final answer. I also told him that the position would require studying an enormous amount of physics and that if I took it, I would only be able to begin after a period of thorough study and theoretical preparation. Rabin was satisfied with my tentative answer and did not pressure me further.
I left the meeting in high spirits. After all, the prime minister had selected me for a position of great importance. But I was also worried how to prepare myself for this new challenge. I shared my misgivings with Poran, who reassured me by promising to help me in the task ahead and by telling me that, as far as the prime minister was concerned, the offer was final and still stood. Later, I learned that Shalhevet Freier, the director-general of the Atomic Energy Commission who had been appointed by Golda Meir, had developed strained relations with Rabin and with Peres in particular.
The prime minister held ministerial responsibility for the Atomic Energy Commission, and in this capacity he served as the Commission’s chairman. In contrast to the prime minister, who served as the body’s ultimate authority, the director-general was a professional in the field of atomic energy.
I made a list of people with whom I wanted to consult: Prof. Israel Dostrovsky, Major General (res.) Dan Tolkovsky, Prof. Saadia Amiel, and Prof. Yuval Ne’eman. Dostrovsky, with whom I had developed a personal relationship after the Yom Kippur War, had preceded Freier as director-general of the Atomic Energy Commission and was currently president of the Weizmann Institute. He was a brilliant physicist, well liked in the world nuclear research community, and had served as a member of the scientific advisory council of the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. I met with Dostrovsky in his office in Rehovot and told him about the prime minister’s offer. He looked at me from behind the thick lenses of his massive, brown-framed glasses, with an expression that was wise, but at the same time somewhat critical and rather amused. He encouraged me by telling me that I was capable of doing the job well and that I had nothing to fear. “You’ll learn what you need to learn,” he said with confidence, “and there is nothing you need to learn about management.”
Although Dan Tolkovsky, Ezer Weizman’s predecessor as commander of the Air Force, was no longer working in the public sector, I knew that he had once considered accepting the same position. I asked him to help me learn as much as possible about the job and how to do it well. Tolkovsky quickly got past his surprise at the prime minister’s offer, and, like Dostrovsky, also offered level-headed advice that gave me the feeling that I could handle the position.
I chose Prof. Amiel as my tutor in the field of nuclear physics. Amiel was a department director at the Nahal Sorek Nuclear Research Center, and like other department directors, also held a teaching position at Tel Aviv University. He was a tall, pleasant man with combed-back hair that had already started to gray; attentive, intelligent eyes peered out from behind a pair of black framed glasses, and an elegant pipe that was always in his mouth. When he became defense minister, Shimon Peres chose Saadia Amiel as his scientific advisor, and I asked him to help me prepare to return to the world of physics.
I consulted with Yuval Ne’eman both because he had previously served as the director of the Nahal Sorek Nuclear Research Center and because of his expertise in the field of nuclear physics. I felt comfortable consulting with him because of our close, friendly relationship, which lasted until his death in 2006. Ne’eman, who assumed the position of director of the Nahal Sorek Nuclear Research Center in 1961 after being discharged from the IDF with the rank of colonel, was a nuclear physicist of international standing. Our relationship began when he was still serving as the president of Tel Aviv University, and it grew closer with his appointment as an advisor to Shimon Peres. Our harmonious working relationship began to develop as we labored together over “Treasure II”, the revised list of procurement requests from the US after the Yom Kippur War. For Ne’eman, the fact that he had not won the Nobel Prize for his contribution to the discovery of the omega minus particle was a scar that refused to heal. Perhaps it was this humiliation that motivated him to again seek public recognition in the political arena.
At the time I also had a one-of-a-kind meeting with the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’s senior defense correspondent journalist Ze’ev Schiff. Schiff had published an article on my appointment to the head of the R&D Unit in September 1973, and he now received permission to interview me as I was leaving. We struck up an immediate intimacy and in the course of the conversation we reached the conclusion that it would make sense to use the sabbatical to resume my academic activity.
I went back for another meeting with the prime minister to give him a final positive response to his offer and to discuss the necessary arrangements. During the meeting I proposed that I begin a mini-sabbatical on nuclear physics as soon as I left the R&D Unit, and Rabin agreed without hesitation. I told Rabin about my intention to begin teaching at Tel Aviv University, and he awarded me with another title that increased the burden I would soon carry: advisor to the prime minister on energy affairs. It was the days of the oil crisis. The oil-producing Arab countries had decided to decrease output by 5% a month in an attempt to force Israel to agree to withdraw from the territories it had occupied during the Six Day War. Saudi Arabia, the largest oil producer, went as far as to cut output by 10%. The price of oil, which rose from $2 to $3 per barrel between 1972 and the end of 1973, jumped to $10 in 1974 and to $36 by the end of the 1970s.
I quickly found myself in the midst of a completely different kind of environment. I had a spacious office in an old Templar structure at Sarona, a secretary, a car, and a driver to cushion my landing into civilian life. Before I began teaching at Tel Aviv University’s School of Business Administration, I designed a program for studying the fundamentals of production management based on my experience at the Kheshet consulting firm and as a teaching assistant and lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I also taught a seminar on R&D project management, which the School of Business Administratio
n designated for experienced managers in industry and other fields.
A Mini-Sabbatical before Directing the Israel Atomic Energy Commission
Studying physics with Prof. Amiel was pure pleasure. The subject was my childhood love, and Prof. Amiel helped compensate for the fact that I had not engaged with it for so many years. I tackled nuclear physics with insatiable curiosity, particularly intrigued by particle theory. Part of my sabbatical program included trips to Europe and the US to meet with scientists at major energy research institutes. My business card, which bore the title “Advisor to the Prime Minister”, opened many doors for me, and the oil crisis, then at its height, also served as an advantage during my meetings. I learned about the effort to encourage research and development in alternative energy sources and was impressed by the momentum created by the US government’s announcement of a new energy policy with large government budgets for research and industrial facilities. Still, it was clear that these were long-term programs and that Israel and the West would remain dependent on oil and oil-producing countries for many years to come. I also visited geothermal energy projects and learned about the challenge of drilling deep enough beneath the earth’s crust to make use of the intense heat beneath the crust.
In the US, the scientific advisor to the Israeli embassy in Washington coordinated a long series of visits and meetings for me, and I found my visit with Prof. Steven Weinberg, the 1979 Nobel Prize Winner in physics, particularly fascinating. Before the meeting I read everything I could on quantum theory and weak and strong forces.
Prof. Weinberg was a short, soft-spoken man, and somewhat of a dreamer. Although he was completely immersed in scientific research that would prove groundbreaking for future generations of physicists, he was also well versed in contemporary problems. We discussed the oil crisis and possible ways of finding alternative energy sources. Weinberg was certain that the US could lead the world effort in this direction, but it remained to be seen whether the issue would be a critical priority of US national policy as the need to develop nuclear weapons had been during World War II.
Prof. Abdus Salam, who was born in the small Punjabi town of Jhang which today is located in Pakistan, was Weinberg’s co-recipient of the 1979 Nobel Prize for physics. At age 14 Salam finished high school with honors and was awarded a scholarship to the Punjab University. Four years later he won a scholarship to study mathematics and physics at Cambridge University’s St. John’s College, where he received a PhD in physics in 1951. Salam’s dissertation was an innovative, fundamental study in quantum electrodynamics. As Yuval Ne’eman’s teacher and supervisor he helped him develop his theory of particles, the basic constituent elements of atoms. In 1964 Ne’eman discovered the omega minus particle, while thousands of miles away Jewish American Professor Murray Gell-Mann was hard at work discovering and defining the elementary particles and fundamental constituents of matter he referred to as “quarks”. Gell-Mann won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1969 and Prof. Salam won it in 1979. Only Ne’eman was left without a Nobel, a slight that always rankled.
Abdus Salam continued his scientific research in Britain. However, he never forgot his homeland Pakistan, serving as an influential member of Pakistan’s Atomic Energy Commission and a scientific advisor to the President of Pakistan between 1961 and 1974. Pakistan cultivated a pool of scientists to work on issues of nuclear energy and built nuclear energy plants to produce electricity. During this period Pakistan also developed a nuclear weapon, but in that endeavor a different Pakistani scientist gained fame: Abdul Qadeer Khan, who studied in Europe and returned to Pakistan with the knowledge and detailed plans necessary to construct centrifuges for the enrichment of uranium. Khan quickly emerged as a major figure in the Pakistani nuclear weapons program and was also responsible for the establishment of a network for selling nuclear secrets which operated for many years, as the government of Pakistan turned a blind eye.
In contrast to Khan, Prof. Abdus Salam found a completely different way to contribute to the community that went beyond his diverse research work. In 1964 Salam established the International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste, Italy. His aim in building this magnificent institution was to provide students from developing countries with the opportunities he had received as a boy due to his exceptional talents. I was intrigued by Salam and the ICTP alike, and at the end of an IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) conference in Vienna, I made plans to visit the professor. With no idea of what kind of tests I would encounter during the visit, I spent weeks reading books and articles that Salam had published. Salam did indeed test me, but not on the subject of particle physics. He had a dense, graying beard and thick black-rimmed glasses from behind which he peered out with an inquisitive expression that seemed to ask: “Who is this Israeli that has dared to visit my center?”
The high point of my marathon tour of energy-related people and institutions in the US was my visit to the Los Alamos national laboratory, preceded by a visit to the Oak Ridge laboratory where uranium was enriched during the Manhattan Project. With funding provided by the US Department of Energy, nuclear research laboratories in the US were in the process of converting their facilities to accommodate non-nuclear research, and issues related to alternative energy sources had begun to interest the nuclear research community. Alternative energy sources were also the focus of the presentations I heard during my visit to Los Alamos, where the emphasis was on geothermal energy and solar power. With a sense of reverence and awe, I ascended to the most secret and well-guarded laboratory in the United States. The way to Los Alamos climbs out of the desert flatlands of New Mexico through thick forests along a windy road. Almost three decades had passed since the conclusion of the Manhattan Project but the secretive culture was still in effect. I reached the site toward evening, and after a light dinner I met my scientist hosts for coffee and conversation by the fireplace.
As I sat in front of the fireplace in the lounge at Los Alamos I could imagine the arguments between J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. The two men, both Jewish, were so different from one another: Oppenheimer with his fluent, soft, and musical way of speaking, and Teller, more abrasive and with his heavy Hungarian accent. Oppenheimer grew up in a well-to-do New York Jewish and was talented, broad-minded, and well-versed in a variety of subjects. He knew that the Manhattan Project had to focus on areas that were both scientifically and technologically feasible. The project team had many questions about the preferable type of fissionable material to use, uranium 235 or plutonium, and about the most suitable structure for the bomb. Teller, who fled from his home in Hungary in 1935, had ideas about a bomb that was even more powerful than the one developed under Oppenheimer’s direction, and he fought for the right to develop it at the time. Oppenheimer’s bomb was based on the fission of atomic nuclei into smaller, lighter nuclei. In contrast, the bomb that Teller envisioned was based on the opposite process — fusion of light hydrogen atoms into heavier nuclei. Both processes release tremendous amounts of energy, but Teller’s assessment that the hydrogen bomb would be more powerful was accurate.
During my visit to the laboratories the following day, the security officers kept a close eye on me to make sure I did not stray into any restricted areas. It was there that I made the acquaintance of another Dr. Weinberg — Alvin Weinberg, the lab’s long-time research director who retired from his position in 1973. At the time he was heading the Energy Analysis Institute at Oak Ridge and was among the first researchers to focus on the environmental effects of carbon dioxide emissions on the atmosphere. We talked about his role in developing electrical power plants and his experience, which he characterized as “hair-raising,” working with the Jewish American navy admiral Hyman Rickover on developing nuclear reactors for submarines and for the production of electricity. “Working with the admiral,” he explained, “was like being permanently strapped into a roller coaster at an amusement park.” But despite the steep ascents and sudden drops of their joint nucle
ar development projects, Weinberg and Rickover had a good relationship that allowed both men to make an important contribution to the successful development of modern reactors for the production of electricity.
Weinberg’s memories of the different programs he had directed prior to the war were an excellent introduction to the subject of the development of nuclear reactors for energy production. Weinberg also told me about the other development projects with which he had been involved, including the pressurized water reactor, which operated on the principle of boiling water and which was also developed by a research team under his leadership. The extreme, yet justified caution that guided the team that built Chicago Pile 1 at the University of Chicago remained a permanent feature of Weinberg’s approach, which placed a great emphasis on safety. A few years later, leaders in the nuclear power plant industry and its lobby in Congress came to regard Dr. Alvin Weinberg as a threat to the financial viability of reactors and fought him tooth and nail until he was removed as director of the Oak Ridge laboratory.
I returned from my dizzying study odyssey abroad with reams of notes I had written down at the end of each day, which contained data, assumptions, equations, and forecasts. The material was diverse, and it would clearly take time for me to digest it all. However, I also had the feeling that the trip had added a new and critical depth to my understanding of the multiplicity of issues related to nuclear physics and nuclear energy. I returned to Israel with a greater sense of self-confidence and the ability to better tackle my new position, which still seemed far off on the horizon.
An important aspect of my preparations to begin functioning as director-general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission was meetings with senior management officials of the IAEC and of the nuclear research centers at Nahal Sorek and Dimona. It just so happened that the key management officials had also helped build the two centers’ nuclear reactors and research laboratories, and I dedicated a significant amount of time to speaking with them and carefully documenting what they said.