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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lorne who wrote (19021)	1/28/2003 3:59:50 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 23908

Don't miss the tagline: Israel dragged its feet until the U.S. gave up Warren Bass NYT Tuesday, January 28, 2003 Nuclear inspections NEW YORK After years of Iraqi deceit, United Nations inspections now feel both frustrating and familiar. "This looks like the rerun of a bad movie," President George W. Bush said last week. In fact, that movie has been showing for longer than he realizes. Nuclear weapons inspections are almost always difficult - even if the country being inspected is a friend of the United States. From 1961 until 1969, U.S. nuclear inspectors were quietly sent into Israel's secret reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Of course, there are obvious differences between Israel then and Iraq now. Israel was hardly a regional menace like Iraq. It sought nuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent to Arab armies and as a guarantee against annihilation. Still, the CIA warned that a nuclear Israel could set off a Middle East arms race and drive Arab states toward Moscow. The Eisenhower administration sought to channel Israel's atomic efforts toward peaceful research. It provided some technology for a small reactor outside Tel Aviv under its Atoms for Peace program, which encouraged nonmilitary nuclear science. But in 1958 a U-2 spy plane spotted a suspicious construction site in the Negev. When news reports confirmed a second reactor's existence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion told the Knesset that Dimona was "designed exclusively for peaceful purposes." President John F. Kennedy, like his predecessor, was inclined to distrust but verify. And Ben-Gurion, fearing Soviet interference, preferred U.S. inspections to international ones. But Israel controlled the inspections tightly. The first tour came, after much Israeli stalling, on May 18, 1961, when two scientists from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission spent the day being shown around Dimona, saw no plutonium-separation plant, and gave the reactor something close to a clean bill of health. Kennedy remained skeptical. In New York on May 30, the new president told Ben-Gurion that he wanted more inspections "on the theory that a woman should not only be virtuous but also have the appearance of virtue." Sixteen months later, two other commission scientists were abruptly taken on another tour around Dimona - this time for just 40 minutes. In 1963, Kennedy finally forced a showdown. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the Israelis that the president wanted semiannual, unhindered visits to Dimona by American experts. Kennedy insisted on two inspections per year to see how fast Dimona was burning through fuel - a telltale sign of a weapons program. Ben-Gurion defiantly offered one supervised visit per year. That spring, Kennedy sent Ben-Gurion two scorching letters warning that U.S.-Israeli relations would be "seriously jeopardized" without real inspections. When Ben-Gurion resigned over an unrelated domestic political scandal, Kennedy repeated the threat to the new prime minister, Levi Eshkol. Eshkol's advisers were split. Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres, who had helped start the Dimona program, wanted to defy the Americans; Israel's ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, urged cooperation. On Aug. 19, Eshkol sought to mollify Washington without abandoning Dimona. He agreed to regular American visits, hinting that the six-month schedule would not be a problem, and promised to return plutonium produced at Dimona to France. Meanwhile, as the Federation of American Scientists later reported, Israel installed false control-room panels and bricked over passages leading to Dimona's innards. Then Lyndon Johnson became president. He proved less resolute than Kennedy,.... iht.com Lorne, I guess you'd say that Kennedy ended up on the "losing side", eh?