Is nuclear ambiguity an anachronism? By Erik Schechter
Jul. 3, 2003 Jerusalem Post
Israel is believed to be the sixth largest nuclear power in the world, and everyone in the country knows about its reactor in Dimona. So why is talking about it a taboo?
Every society has its taboos. The Yanomamo people of Brazil do not dare utter the names of their deceased. Likewise, the Apaches in North America, avoid owls as incarnations of the dead.
In Israel, one does not mention the country's nuclear weapons program in Dimona. Everyone knows it exists, but no one speaks its name without adding the magic formula "according to foreign sources": breaking the taboo can mean a jail cell. This deliberate governmental policy is called "nuclear ambiguity."
But in 1986, former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu sold to the London Sunday Times photographs of plutonium spheres used for triggers in Israeli nuclear warheads. The Mossad quickly caught up with the shutterbug in Rome. Vanunu is currently finishing up an 18-year sentence for treason, espionage, and selling state secrets in an Ashkelon prison.
Today, typing in the keywords "Israel" and "nuclear weapons" draws no fewer than 269,000 hits on the internet. One can even find satellite photographs of the Dimona nuclear complex on the Web. Yet while India and Pakistan took the plunge in 1998 and declared themselves nuclear powers, Israel still clings to the policy of nuclear ambiguity out of fear of being slapped with economic sanctions.
The policy is hopelessly outdated. In fact, the strategic considerations that first led Israel to secretly develop a nuclear program in the 1950s no longer hold. As the region's leader in conventional military power, Israel may best serve its security needs by pushing for a Middle East free of all weapons of mass destruction (WMDs).
Israel is believed to be the sixth largest nuclear power in the world. According to Joe Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Israel has enough nuclear material to fashion 100-180 bombs.
Others have put that estimate as high as 400 bombs. "That's the point of ambiguity - to keep everyone guessing," says Cirincione.
Cirincione says that Israel's nonconventional forces are arranged in a triad: nuclear warheads can be delivered by air, land, and sea. The idea behind the redundancy in forces is, as the old cliche goes, not to keep all your eggs in one basket. So if for some reason its 200 F-16 fighter jets cannot reach their target, Israel could always let loose with a 500-kilometer range Jericho missile or Jericho II, which can fly three times that distance.
Finally, in 1999, Israel bought and received three Dolphin-class diesel submarines from Germany. With a travelling range of 4,500 kilometers, these vessels have the ability to launch cruise missiles, and it is suspected that they are armed with nuclear-tipped Popeyes.
But rather than counterbalancing Arab weapons of mass destruction, he says, Israel's nuclear program ironically provided "the strongest stimuli for the Arabs to build their own bio-chemical weapons programs."
ACCORDING TO Avner Cohen's Israel and the Bomb, published in the United States, Israel's nuclear program goes back to 1955, the year of the first international conference on atomic energy. Israeli scientists, such as Weizmann Institute physicist Amos De Shalit, thought they could exploit president Dwight D. Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program as cover for a reactor that would really build nuclear bombs.
Shimon Peres, who was director-general of the Defense Ministry at the time, had other plans. The father of Israel's nuclear program, Peres turned to the French, who had secretly allied themselves with Israel during the 1956 Sinai Campaign.
Peres was on good terms with prime minister Guy Mollet, and his successor Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, and he won their country's agreement to help Israel build the Dimona reactor in 1958.
Peres writes in his book Battling for Peace that the project was built over the objections of the Finance Ministry and the Foreign Ministry. Dimona's construction cost Israel $80 million, half of which was raised by private donors abroad.
By 1959, the new, pro-Arab de Gaulle government backed out of the reactor deal and Israel continued on its own. A year later, American intelligence caught wind of the project, and the Eisenhower Administration demanded an explanation. Israel claimed that Dimona was designed for peaceful uses only and that any plutonium byproduct - useful for making bombs - would be returned to France. It never was.
President Kennedy was particularly tenacious on the nuclear non-proliferation front. In April 1963 he took then-deputy defense minister Peres off guard and bluntly asked him about Israel's nuclear effort, to which Peres replied, "I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first."
That would become the shibboleth of Israel's nuclear ambiguity policy. The Americans eventually came to realize that by "introduction" Israeli diplomats meant conducting a nuclear explosive test. By the late 1960s, Israel had already produced a nuclear bomb, so it seemed unlikely it would give it up by signing the 1968 Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty.
A year later, the Nixon Administration dropped the idea of American inspections in Dimona, and Israel would go on to deny the existence of a nuclear arsenal.
The United States was more than willing to play along, says Larry Korb, director of national security studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, in New York. A former assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration, Korb says that "there would have been negative domestic political consequences if it looked like we were pressuring an ally surrounded by enemies to give up weapons needed for its defense."
It was also not guaranteed that Israel would yield to American pressure on such a sensitive topic."If we tried to force Israel to give up its nuclear weapons, and it said no, we would lose credibility," he notes. (see box on India-Pakistan.)
MUCH HAS changed in the Middle East since Israel first decided to travel down the nuclear road. Israel is no longer a friendless, impoverished country surrounded by enemies backed by a hostile superpower.
Egypt signed a peace treaty with the Jewish state in 1979 and Jordan followed suit in 1994. Iraq has likewise been neutralized as a threat after coalition forces toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein this past April. As for the Soviet Union, the Arab states' erstwhile patron fragmented in 1991 into 15 successor states - all of which currently have diplomatic ties with Israel.
By contrast, the United States - which only began selling arms to Israel in 1962 - provides the Jewish state with more than $3 billion in annual aid. The Americans have some 250,000 troops stationed in the region, including prepositioned munitions depots in Israel.
It has long been suspected that the IDF has been galloping ahead of its remaining opponents, but now there is hard proof. In May, Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies came out with a new study that argues that - thanks to advantages in precision-guided munitions, intelligence-gathering, and communications - the Israel Air Force could quite comfortably best a coalition of Arab countries.
"Against Syria alone, it's a joke," says Col. (Res.) Shmuel Gordon, who authored the study. "Israel has a four-to-one advantage in military air power."
What makes Gordon's work so radical is his methodology. Instead of just blindly comparing platforms, such as a MiG-21 fighter jet versus an F-16, the study examines the quality of the weapons systems they carry.
He can also track the rise and fall over time of a nation's "index of power" vis-a-vis its rivals. His conclusion: Over the past 10 years, the military has been spending too much money and often on the wrong things.
An ex-employee at the Dimona reactor estimated its operational cost at $500 million. "Building nuclear weapons is immoral and a waste of money," says Gordon.
They surely do not help fighting the type of low-intensity conflicts that the IDF has been waging with the Palestinians, but what about countering biological and chemical weapons?
The fear of the "poor man's atomic bomb" is inflated, say nuclear nonproliferation experts. "Nuclear weapons are far, far more deadly than other weapons of mass destruction," says Daryl Kimball, director of the DC-based Arms Control Association.
"Bio-chemical weapons may kill hundreds," says Cirincione, "but they aren't the Plague." As a tool for terrorism they are effective, but not so in mechanized warfare. It is not by accident that they were used in the Iran-Iraq war, which saw infantry attacking in human waves.
Something also has changed since Dimona first went into operation: The core is now some 40 years old. This is a safety hazard, says Uzi Even, who worked for 20 years as a physicist in the reactor and was the first openly gay Knesset member.
Dimona was a success, says Even. Aside from its intended purpose, the 1960s-era reactor served as a school for the young nation's machinists and metal workers. But he now worries about its continued safety.
"In every other country, they close down a reactor that old," says Even. "Radiation damage leads to a deterioration of the core."
Gerald Steinberg, a senior research associate at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, says that Dimona is under the strict supervision of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission and "a special strategic subcommittee of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset."
But Even insists that Dimona is military-industrial fiefdom above the law.
"The environment minister cannot enter the place," says Even. "I find it hard to believe that, over the past 40 years, there have been no reported accidents occurring there."
But more importantly - and here the physicist carefully chooses his words - "We have already gotten all that we needed from the reactor."
Closing down the plant would not change that fact. Again, without saying what is produced at the reactor, he simply notes that "plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years."
Many are doubtful that the international community would be satisfied with such a move. There would still have to be an accounting and destruction of suspected nuclear weapons held by Israel. "Closing down Dimona would be a positive first step," says Kimball, "but it won't solve the basic problem of WMDs."
INDIA AND Pakistan offer an example of another alternative strategy for Israel: openly declaring its stock and weathering only temporary sanctions. Louis Rene Beres, a hawkish political scientist at Purdue University, argues that coming out of the closet would actually help Israel's nuclear deterrence capability.
According to Beres, it is not enough that enemy states know that Israel has WMDs. They only deter if the enemy believes they could realistically be used. The Libyans, Iranians, and Syrians "need to recognize that these Israeli weapons are sufficiently invulnerable to attack and/or that these weapons are targeted at their own pertinent weapons and command-control systems."
However, Steinberg notes that Israel, unlike Pakistan and India, is not racing against a rival nuclear opponent in proving its military capability. So long as no enemy is on the nuclear threshold, there is no incentive to go public. Preoccupied with building its own bunker-busting tactical nuclear weapons, the Bush Administration will not challenge Israel's nuclear ambiguity, adds Korb.
"Ending this policy would create new tensions with Washington that are unnecessary and potentially very costly for Israel," says Steinberg.
The most novel idea is for Israel to offer to give up its nuclear stock in return for regional peace and a ban on WMDs in the Middle East. In 1996, Peres floated the idea when he said, "Give me peace and we'll give up the atom."
Should Israel forcefully press the issue now, countries like Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria will find themselves under the uncomfortable scrutiny of the Bush Administration - especially after its tour de force against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Furthermore, at the end of the day, Israel would still keep its conventional military advantage.
True, Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan voluntarily gave up their nuclear weapons and later regretted doing so, but they only inherited their arsenals from the former USSR. They lacked the technology and knowledge to build them themselves. A de-weaponized Israel would find itself in a similar situation to that of Japan - ready to build weapons if the need arose. (See box)
Steinberg is not persuaded. "Knowledge is one thing, getting the materials and facilities is quite another," he says.
Charles Glaser, a nuclear strategy expert at the University of Chicago, says that even if Israel could opt for a virtual nuclear stock - that is, having all the basic components of a bomb, it may be preferable for regional peace to keep its current arsenal.
"The problem with virtual nuclear stocks is when you need them, you have to race against the other side to put them together first. That creates a very unstable situation."
India and Pakistan join in
Once upon a time, there were three states that pursued nuclear ambiguity as a strategy. However, in 1998, two of them - India and Pakistan - openly tested their nuclear weapons, incurring short-lived economic sanctions from the United States.
It was not as if the two countries took the world by surprise. The United States and other Western nations knew of India and Pakistan's nuclear capabilities for decades. India, in particular, did an even poorer job than Israel of disguising its nuclear weapons program.
In 1974, Indira Ghandi's government detonated the country's first atomic bomb, which was explained away as a "peaceful nuclear explosive" intended for heavy-duty construction projects. The Pakistanis did not fall for that line and proceeded with their own nuclear program.
"India made a huge strategic mistake in openly becoming a nuclear power," says Gerald Steinberg, a senior research associate at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat (BESA) Center for Strategic Studies, "essentially allowing Pakistan to follow, and thus, reaching strategic parity."
Kamal Mitra Chenoy, an associate professor of international studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, agrees that India threw away a three-to-one advantage over Pakistan in conventional arms, but New Delhi had little choice.
"They were trying to deter China which detonated its own bomb in 1964," he says.
India had two enemies on its borders. Just two years before, the Chinese People's Liberation Army occupied the disputed region of Aksai Chin and still lays claim to an Indian federal state. In 1971, China backed Pakistan in its war with India.
But tensions simmered down somewhat between India and Pakistan. Both countries professed the shared goal of arms control, though they avoided signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty and went on to test both short-range and intermediate-range missiles.
"But unlike Israel, they did not fit their nuclear devices on missiles and planes," says Daryl Kymball, director of the Arms Control Center in Washington.
They kept virtual arsenals, so the US was willing to turn a blind eye. In fact, for five years until 1990, the White House fought off a Congressional attempt to apply limited sanctions on Pakistan.
That all changed in March 1998.
Atal Behari Vajpayee of the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) became prime minister of India. The BJP had long supported developing nuclear weapons, but now the majority of the Indian public had come around to this position. Chenoy states that besides strategic considerations, the failure of the recognized nuclear powers to disarm - as is their obligation under the NPT - ensured the popularity of the initiative.
Responding to India's public rethinking of its nuclear policy, Pakistan tested its intermediate-range Ghauri ballistic missile in April. In mid-May, India openly tested five nuclear bombs, prompting Pakistan to conduct tests of its own.
Israel, the one remaining undeclared nuclear power, had piggybacked off early French nuclear tests and then weaponized by late May 1967. Not so, India and Pakistan. Both countries had to be sure that their virtual stocks could be translated into effective weapons.
"They had to start thinking about the vulnerability," says Charles Glaser, an expert on nuclear strategy at the University of Chicago.
In response, the US slapped Pakistan and India with the Glenn Amendment to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, which prohibits assistance to any non-nuclear power that conducts a nuclear explosion.
But soon the Americans were reversing course. And after 9/11, when the United States needed Pakistani assistance against the Taliban, all sanctions were removed from both countries.
The US simply had to deal with the fact that there were two more declared nuclear powers in the world.
Japan's virtual nukes
If it wanted, Japan could build a nuclear weapon within 30 days, says Joe Cirincione, director of the Nonproliferation Project at the DC-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The East Asian country has the money, technology, and - most importantly - the plutonium to pull it off.
"Japan has virtual nukes," says Cirincione.
During World War II, the Japanese army was already hard at work on an atomic bomb at Tokyo's Institute of Physical and Chemical Research. But due to a lack of government funding, the weapons project did not make much progress.
The Americans delivered the coup d'grace in April 1945. Some four months before the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a B-29 bomber obliterated the institute's thermal diffusion separation apparatus.
After the occupation and reconstruction, Japan emerged as a de-militarized country relying on the protection of the US armed forces.
On February 5, 1968, Prime Minister Eisaku Sato pledged that his country would not possess, manufacture, or accept nuclear weapons. Three years later, the Japanese parliament affirmed that commitment, and in 1976, the country ratified the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
Japan did not, however, entirely forgo the atom.
Despite its galloping modernization, the country is poor in natural energy resources. The financial aftershocks of the 1973 Arab oil embargo also taught it not to depend too heavily on imported fuel. So it should come as no surprise that Japan's nuclear output nearly doubled between 1985 and 1996.
Still, Japan has been suspected of having all the basic, raw components for a nuclear bomb without actually producing one. Its shift from uranium fuel to stockpiles of plutonium MOX (mixed oxides) particularly worries non-proliferation experts.
"Japan was trying to create a self-perpetuating source of fuel, so it would not have to import uranium," says Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association in Washington.
Since 1969, Japan began sending its nuclear waste to Europe for reprocessing. There, plutonium was extracted from spent uranium fuel rods to be fed right back into the nuclear energy production loop. But the plutonium MOX powder proved too costly to use in reactors, says Kimball, so the stuff has just been piling up.
And the temptation to turn to weapons manufacturing likewise grows.
Bombmakers prefer plutonium to uranium because it requires less radiation to create a nuclear chain reaction. In other words, one gets more bang for the buck. Indeed, in June 2002, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda publicly stated that "depending upon the world situation, circumstances and public opinion could require Japan to possess nuclear weapons."
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