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For Your Files: This
caught my eye making my cyber rounds of the Sunday morning Opinion pages. But
the embedded link in paragraph 3 to declassified
documents was ‘broken’. So I Googled the title and authors and followed the
trail to the reference at the NSA archives at George Washington University, linked
below. In light of current
developments with Iran over the development of nuclear technology and its
threat to ‘unsign’ the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty, the article and the 1998
book Israel and the Bomb, make interesting and perhaps more than coincidental
reading from the opinion pages of the newspaper read in the nation’s capital
and beyond. The documents were declassified just this Friday, April 28th.
Both sides of the debate about the US and its motives and intentions with Iran
will find substance for today’s diplomatic brinkmanship. Then, as now,
the unseen participant is the MIC, military industrial complex and the global
trades in arms, as in Russia’s sale of Tor missiles to Iran while launching a
spy satellite for Israel, and joining China and India in shopping sprees. All the Great Game players, especially the
US, are well armed and appear to be fortifying themselves. Israel has stepped
up its rhetoric in response to Iran’s. Is a proxy war inevitable? Or will Bush secretly
tell Olmert that as long as Iran doesn’t test a nuclear bomb, as Israel pledged
to do, the US can live with it? Would Israel ‘coming out’ in the open about its
nuclear technology force a more realistic and honest environment to defuse the
growing instability? Here is the
chronology of events Nixon, Kissinger, Laird, Richardson et al undertook in the late 60s,
especially this key nugget from web source#1: ·
On the eve of Meir's visit the State Department prepared a background
paper for the President concluding that "Israel might very well now have a
nuclear bomb" and certainly "had the technical ability and material
resources to produce weapons grade uranium for a number of weapons." ·
No written record of the meeting between President Nixon and Prime
Minister Meir on September 26 is available, but it was a key event in the
emergence of the 1969 US-Israeli nuclear understanding. Subsequent documents
suggest that Meir pledged to maintain nuclear restraint-no test, no
declaration, no visibility-and after the meeting the Nixon White House decided
to "stand down" on pressure on Israel. ·
On October 7, 1969 Ambassador Rabin formally provided his belated
answers to the US questions: Israel will not become a nuclear power; Israel
will decide on the NPT after its election in November; Israel will not deploy
strategic missiles until 1972. ·
On February 23, 1970 Ambassador Rabin informed Kissinger that, in light
of President Nixon's conversation with Meir in September 1969, Israel "has
no intention to sign the NPT." ·
Subsequently, the
White House decided to
end the secret
annual U.S. visits to the Israeli nuclear facility at Dimona. Lower-level officials were not told of
the decision and as late as May 1970 they were under the impression that the
visits could be revived. ·
By 1975, in keeping with the understanding with Israel, the State Department refused to tell
Congress that it was
certain that Israel had the bomb, even though U.S. intelligence was convinced
that it did. The Untold Story of
Israel's Bomb Commentary by Avner Cohen and
William Burr, Washington Post, Sunday, April 30, 2006; B01 On Sept. 9, 1969, a
big brown envelope was delivered to the Oval Office on behalf of CIA Director
Richard M. Helms. On it he had written, "For and to be opened only by: The
President, The White House." The precise contents of the envelope are
still unknown, but it was the latest intelligence on one of Washington's most
secretive foreign policy matters: Israel's nuclear program. The material was so
sensitive that the nation's spymaster was unwilling to share it with anybody
but President Richard M. Nixon himself. The now-empty envelope
is inside a two-folder set labeled "NSSM 40," held by the Nixon
Presidential Materials Project at the National Archives. (NSSM is the acronym
for National Security Study Memorandum, a series of policy studies produced by
the national security bureaucracy for the Nixon White House.) The NSSM 40 files
are almost bare because most of their documents remain classified. With the aid of With the aid ofrecently declassified documents
, we now know that NSSM
40 was the Nixon administration's effort to grapple with the policy
implications of a nuclear-armed Israel. These documents offer unprecedented
insight into the tense deliberations in the White House in 1969 - a crucial
time in which international ratification of the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT) was uncertain and U.S. policymakers feared that a Middle Eastern
conflagration could lead to superpower conflict. Nearly four decades later, as
the world struggles with nuclear ambitions in Iran, India and elsewhere, the
ramifications of this hidden history are still felt. Israel's nuclear
program began more than 10 years before Helms's envelope landed on Nixon's
desk. In 1958, Israel secretly initiated work at what was to become the Dimona
nuclear research site. Only about 15 years after the Holocaust, nuclear
nonproliferation norms did not yet exist, and Israel's founders believed they
had a compelling case for acquiring nuclear weapons. In 1961, the CIA estimated
that Israel could produce nuclear weapons within the decade. The discovery
presented a difficult challenge for U.S. policymakers. From their perspective,
Israel was a small, friendly state - albeit one outside the boundaries of U.S.
security guarantees - surrounded by larger enemies vowing to destroy it. Yet
government officials also saw the Israeli nuclear program as a potential threat
to U.S. interests. President John F. Kennedy feared that without decisive
international action to curb nuclear proliferation, a world of 20 to 30 nuclear-armed
nations would be inevitable within a decade or two. The Kennedy and
Johnson administrations fashioned a complex scheme of annual visits to Dimona
to ensure that Israel would not develop nuclear weapons. But the Israelis were
adept at concealing their activities. By late 1966, Israel had reached the
nuclear threshold, although it decided not to conduct an atomic test. By the time Prime
Minister Levi Eshkol visited President Lyndon B. Johnson in January 1968, the
official State Department view was that despite Israel's growing nuclear
weapons potential, it had "not embarked on a program to produce a nuclear
weapon." That assessment, however, eroded in the months ahead. By the
fall, Assistant Defense Secretary Paul C. Warnke concluded that Israel had already
acquired the bomb when Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin explained to him how he
interpreted Israel's pledge not to be the first country to introduce nuclear
weapons into the region. According to Rabin, for nuclear weapons to be
introduced, they needed to be tested and publicly declared. Implicitly, then,
Israel could possess the bomb without "introducing" it. The question of what
to do about the Israeli bomb would fall to Nixon. Unlike his Democratic
predecessors, he and his national security adviser, Henry A. Kissinger, were
initially skeptical about the effectiveness of the NPT. And though they may
have been inclined to accommodate Israel's nuclear ambitions, they would have
to manage senior State Department and Pentagon officials whose perspectives differed.
Documents prepared between February and April 1969 reveal a great sense of
urgency and alarm among senior officials about Israel's nuclear progress. As Defense Secretary
Melvin R. Laird wrote in March 1969, these "developments were not in the
United States' interests and should, if at all possible, be stopped."
Above all, the Nixon administration was concerned that Israel would publicly
display its nuclear capabilities. Apparently prompted by
those high-level concerns, Kissinger issued NSSM
40 - titled Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program - on April 11, 1969. In
it he asked the national security bureaucracy for a review of policy options
toward Israel's nuclear program. In the weeks that followed, the issue was
taken up by a senior review group (SRG), chaired by Kissinger, that included
Helms, Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson, Deputy Defense Secretary
David Packard and Joint Chiefs Chairman Earle Wheeler. The one available
report of an SRG meeting on NSSM 40 suggests that the bureaucracy was interested
in pressuring Israel to halt its nuclear program. How much pressure to exert
remained open. Kissinger wanted to "avoid direct confrontation,"
while Richardson was willing to apply pressure if an investigation to determine
Israel's intentions showed that some key assurances would not be forthcoming.
In such circumstances, the United States could tell the Israelis that scheduled
deliveries of F-4 Phantom jets to Israel would have to be reconsidered. By mid-July 1969, Nixon had let it be known
that he was leery of using the Phantoms as leverage, so when Richardson and Packard summoned Rabin
on July 29 to discuss the nuclear issue, the idea of a probe that involved
pressure had been torpedoed. Although Richardson and Packard emphasized the
seriousness with which they viewed the nuclear problem, they had no threat to back up their
rhetoric. Richardson posed three
issues for Rabin to respond to: the status of Israel's NPT deliberations;
assurances that "non-introduction" meant "non-possession"
of nuclear weapons; and assurances that Israel would not produce or deploy the
Jericho ballistic missile. Rabin, however, was unresponsive except to say that
the NPT was still "under study." Nixon and Israeli
Prime Minister Golda Meir would have to address the nuclear issue when they met
in late September. Perhaps the most
fateful event of this tale was Nixon's one-on-one meeting with Meir in the Oval
Office on Sept. 26, 1969. In the days before
Meir's visit, the State Department produced background papers suggesting that
the horse was already out of the barn: "Israel might very well now have a
nuclear bomb" and certainly "already had the technical ability and
material resources to produce weapon-grade material for a number of
weapons." If that was true, it meant that events had overtaken the NSSM 40
exercise. In later years, Meir
never discussed the substance of her private conversation with Nixon, saying
only, "I could not quote him then, and I will not quote him now."
Yet, according to
declassified Israeli documents, since the early 1960s, Meir had been convinced that
"Israel should tell the United States the truth [about the nuclear issue]
and explain why." Even without the
record of this meeting, informed speculation is possible. It is likely that
Nixon started with a plea for openness. Meir, in turn, probably acknowledged -
tacitly or explicitly - that Israel had reached a weapons capability, but
probably pledged extreme caution. (Years later, Nixon told CNN's Larry King
that he knew for certain that Israel had the bomb, but he wouldn't reveal his
source.) Meir may have assured Nixon that Israel thought of nuclear weapons as
a last-resort option, a way to provide her Holocaust-haunted nation with a psychological sense of existential
deterrence. Subsequent memorandums
from Kissinger to Nixon provide a limited sense of what the national security
adviser understood happened at the meeting. Kissinger noted that the president
had emphasized to Meir that "our primary concern was that the Israeli
[government] make
no visible introduction of nuclear weapons or undertake a nuclear test program." Thus, Israel would be committed
to conducting its nuclear affairs cautiously and secretly; their status would
remain uncertain and unannounced. On Feb. 23, 1970,
Rabin told Kissinger privately that he wanted the president to know that, in
light of the Meir-Nixon conversation, "Israel has no intention to sign the
NPT." Rabin, Kissinger wrote, "wanted also to make sure there was no
misapprehension at the White House about Israel's current intentions." Kissinger informed
Nixon that he told Rabin that he would notify the president. And with that, the
decade-long U.S. effort to curb Israel's nuclear program ended. That enterprise
was replaced by understandings negotiated at the highest level, between the
respective heads of state, that have governed Israel's nuclear conduct ever
since. That so little is
known today about the tale of NSSM 40 is not surprising. Dealing with Israel's
nuclear ambitions was thornier for the Nixon administration than for its
predecessors because it was forced to deal with the problem at the critical
time when Israel appeared to be crossing the nuclear threshold. Yet, even as Nixon and
Kissinger enabled Israel to flout the NPT, NSSM 40 allowed them to create a
defensible record. As was his typical modus operandi, Kissinger used NSSM 40 to
maintain control over key officials who wanted to take action on the problem. Politically, the
Nixon-Meir agreement allowed both leaders to continue with their old public
policies without being forced to openly acknowledge the new reality. As long as
Israel kept the bomb invisible - no test, declaration, or any other act
displaying nuclear capability - the United States could live with it. Over time, the
tentative Nixon-Meir understanding became the foundation for a remarkable
U.S.-Israeli deal, accompanied by a tacit but strict code of behavior to which
both nations closely adhered. Even during its darkest hours in the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, Israel was cautious not to make any public display of its nuclear
capability. Yet set against
contemporary values of transparency and accountability, the Nixon-Meir deal of
1969 now stands as a striking and burdensome anomaly. Israel's nuclear posture
is inconsistent with the tenets of a modern liberal democracy. The deal is also
burdensome for the United States, provoking claims about double standards in
U.S. nuclear nonproliferation policy. It is especially
striking to compare the Nixon administration's stance toward Israel in 1969
with the way Washington is trying to accommodate India in 2006. As problematic
as the proposed nuclear pact with New Delhi is, it at least represents an
effort to deal openly with the issue. Unlike the case of
Iran today - where a nation is publicly violating its NPT obligations and where
the United States and the international community are acting in the open - the
White House in 1969 addressed the Israeli weapons program in a highly secretive
fashion. That kind of deal-making would be impossible now. Without open acknowledgment
of Israel's nuclear status, such ideas as a nuclear-free Middle East, or even
the inclusion of Israel in an updated NPT regime, cannot be discussed properly.
It is time for a new deal to replace the Nixon-Meir understandings of 1969,
with Israel telling the truth and finally normalizing its nuclear affairs. Avner Cohen is a senior research
fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at the University
of Maryland and author of "Israel and the Bomb" (Columbia University
Press). William Burr is a senior
analyst at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. A
longer version of this article appears in the May/June issue of theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042801326.html Related See the longer
version of this Washington Post article in the May/June 2006 issue of Bulletin
of Atomic Scientists Israel Crosses the Threshold http://www.thebulletin.org/article.php?art_ofn=mj06cohen Which refers
to the documents at GWU’s NSA Archives Israel Crosses the Threshold http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/index.htm.
Note documents
are in PDF format. Notes at the very bottom explain codes for availability. |
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