It hasn’t been a good season for Israel. Even before its ill-advised raid on the Gaza convoy, which could have and might yet cause the Security Council’s agreement on Iran sanctions to come unglued, there was a string of more or less unsavory allegations about the history of its nuclear weapons program.
First came the claim, not new as such, that Israel obtained the highly enriched uranium from its first nuclear weapons from a factory in Pennsylvania, with the active cooperation of its CEO, Zalman Shapiro. In the March-April issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Victor Gilinsky and Roger J. Mattson prove the assertion beyond any reasonable doubt, I believe, mustering evidence that is at times darkly hilarious–for example, reports of visits to the NUMEC plant by the likes of the top Mossad agent who had managed the kidnapping of Eichmann in Argentina, now pretending that he was a mere member of a trade delegation, as U.S. officials looked the other way.
Gilinsky and Mattson, “Revisiting the NUMEC Affair,” happen to mention that Seymour Hersch, in his book about Israel’s nuclear weapons program, somehow allowed himself to be convinced that Shapiro and NUMEC were innocent. For the record, let’s also recall that Hersh provides in his Sampson Option an exemplary account of supposedly mysterious 1979 flash in the South Atlantic: He leaves little doubt but that it was a nuclear test, probably of an Israeli tactical nuclear weapon but carried out with South African cooperation.
Now comes yet another distasteful claim, this one published just before the Israeli raid in Britain’s Guardian. Based on a new book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Alliance with Apartheid South Africa,” the Guardian reports that in 1975 Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres offered to sell nuclear weapons to Pretoria, in the context of broader talks about nuclear and military cooperation. Peres and Israeli authorities have indignantly denied the claims.
These are matters all interested in the subject (or subjects) will have their own opinions about. (As for me, I find it hard to believe that the Israeli government would ever have decided to actually provide South Africa with nuclear weapons; conversely, I’ve always found it impossible to believe the flash detected on Sept. 22, 1979 by the Vela satellite was anything other than a joint Israeli-South African nuclear weapon test.) The important thing to recognize, as I see it, is that however intrinsically interesting such details may be, they are just history.
What’s not history is that Israel has a nuclear arsenal and that, because Israel has never openly acknowledged its existence, that arsenal has no formal legitimacy. Israel continues to take the coy and disingenuous line that “it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East”–a formulation easily as dishonest and annoying as India’s 1974 claim it merely was testing a “peaceful nuclear device.”
Today Israel faces the near-certain prospect that it will soon confront two hostile nuclear-armed hostile states, one openly dedicated to its extinction, the other profoundly unstable, with a populace that is widely sympathetic to jihadism, with chronically unstable governments, and a state that could disintegrate at any time. Israelis and all who have the survival of Israel at heart need to think squarely about whether there’s any diplomatic way to avoid that prospect, as there’s plainly no reasonable military option.
As long as we’re on the subject of what history and what’s not, we may as well visit other situations where the distinction has some relevance. One doesn’t have to occupy oneself much with nuclear dilemmas on the Subcontinent to realize that almost the whole world is divided between those who can’t forgive India its peaceful nuclear test and those who can’t forgive Pakistan for indulging A.Q. Kahn. Lingering resentments of that kind–not to mention plain old ethnic, religious, and racial prejudice–is getting in the way of recognizing that nuclear-armed Pakistan and nuclear-armed India are here to stay.
What’s needed now is to get them into NPT, so that they’ll be subject to the treaty’s requirement to not aid and abet other nuclear weapons aspirants, and to prepare the way for comprehensive bans on nuclear weapons tests and production of fissile materials for weapons.
India and Pakistan may seem locked in a strategic rivalry that inevitably will doom any serious attempts at nuclear limitation, but Princeton University’s Zia Mian and his colleague A.H. Nayyar argue otherwise in a recent article in Arms Control Today. Anybody interested in the nuclear future as opposed to the nuclear pasts of the two countries can start in no better place than their “Playing the Nuclear Game: Pakistan and the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty,” which takes a much broader view of this subject than one might imagine.
The one place where history seems destined to dominate for the foreseeable future is the Korean peninsula. Here suspicions run so deep, and the two countries have been so close to war so recently, it’s hard to imagine any immediate resolution of the nuclear crisis except on military terms. Even if the leaders of North Korea were a lot less nutty, they’d have to wonder whether they can afford to give up their little nuclear deterrent, given what happened to the DDR’s Communist leaders when the two Germanies reunited.
So unless their Chinese patrons are persuaded to simply order the North Koreans to disarm–or unless there’s a dreadful, tragic war ending in the North’s nuclear disarmament–it seems we are stuck with the status quo for a good while to come.
