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Ever since Israel's founding, the same question has been asked by nosy journalists and students of international affairs: "Does Israel possess nuclear weapons?" And ever since the administration of Levi Eshkol (1963–69), right up through Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime ministers have responded with the same mantra: "Israel will not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East."
What that reply means, of course, all depends on what you mean by "introduce." If it means "announce the possession of nuclear weapons," or "openly test nuclear devices," or "threaten to use nuclear weapons," then Israel has clearly not yet "introduced" nuclear weapons into the Middle East. But if "introduce" means to have ready for actual deployment several nuclear warheads and a credible delivery system, then Israel actually introduced nuclear weapons into the region as far back as 1967. Early that year, to use the somewhat edgy language of Washington-based Israeli scholar Avner Cohen in this entirely fascinating book, Israel already had "a bomb in the basement," a primitive but usable nuclear fissionable weapon.
What makes Cohen's book so interesting is not that it openly reveals this fact; after all, several earlier books have sketched out, often in convincing detail, the basic facts of Israel's nuclear-weapons program. Cohen's agenda is much more basic. He wants to examine what he calls the "opacity" of Israel's nuclear status in both the domestic and international arena. He wants to probe the motivations and intents of Israel's political, military, and scientific leaders in making Israel's nuclear status the holy unmentionable name of Middle East politics.
It was not until 1970, incredibly, that the CIA finally was certain that Israel had become the world's sixth nuclear state (after the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China), and the word—not convincingly denied by the Israelis—spread quickly through British and American news publications. By then, however, its impact had already been discounted by three factors of international politics which, though quite distinct, had nevertheless for several years reinforced one another. These were: (1) genuine U.S. uncertainty about the status of the Israeli program, (2) an unwillingness to confront Israel openly once the United States was sure, and (3) the threat to Middle East peace if the Arabs were certain that Israel was nuclear equipped.
The failure of the U.S. intelligence community to interpret correctly growing evidence of Israel's nuclear program from the late 1950s onward in retrospect has elements of Keystone Cops obtuseness. American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft and diplomatic military attaches stationed in Tel Aviv had from 1958 onward clear photographs of a gigantic, top-secret nuclear plant under construction at Dimona in the Negev desert, not far from the ancient biblical site of Beersheba. Under persistent prodding, the Israelis permitted no fewer than seven official U.S. scientific inspections at the Dimona site between 1961 and 1969, when they came to an end. Yet the visiting Americans were never able to prove that uranium reprocessing, the prerequisite of producing nuclear fissionable material, was in fact being carried out under their very noses.
Intelligence failures in ascertaining the nuclear capabilities of foreign countries seems to have plagued the U.S. foreign policy establishment for half a century. The most recent examples are the U.S. failure to forecast India's explosion of nuclear devices in 1998 and to grasp how close Iraq came to nuclear weapons status in 1990 be fore the Gulf War.
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