Before the Beginning: The Early History of Israel's Nuclear Project

Introduction

ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR PROJECT STARTED IN earnest in 1955. The year was marked by two developments, one domestic and the other international, that proved fateful for the initiation of the project. On the domestic scene, David Ben-Gurion, who always believed in the atomic vision, returned to power, first as minister of defense and a few months later as prime minister. On the international scene, President Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace initiative, announced a year earlier, created a sense that a great era for nuclear energy was on the horizon.

In August 1955, the same month that Ben-Gurion was re-elected as prime minister, the first international conference on atomic energy convened in Geneva. It was the biggest scientific extravaganza ever held, entirely devoted to promoting the nuclear revolution. Professor David Ernst Bergmann, the chairman of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC), wrote an enthusiastic top-secret report to Ben-Gurion urging him to beef up the groundwork for the desired project. The next two years, 1956-1957, were devoted to just that: debating alternatives, searching for overseas partners, recruiting new personnel, and regrouping organizationally. It turned out that these activities coincided with the coalescence of the French-Israeli alliance. The Dimona project—conceived and sought-after in 1956, put together in 1957, and initiated in 1958—was the product of those efforts. This was the dawn of Israel's nuclear history

There was, however, a special period "before the beginning." This was the five-year period 1949-1953, when the faith that Israel would have a national nuclear project in the not-too-distant future, and the confidence that such a project was not beyond its scientific and technological reach, was planted and nurtured. I call it "before the beginning," because no project was born out of these efforts. In fact, the great expectations for the project-to-be were shattered in 1954, after Pinhas Lavon became minister of defense. Lavon had little faith in the vision of a nuclear Israel, a vision Ben-Gurion, Bergmann, and Director-General Shimon Peres nourished. Consequently, he "sold" the nuclear physicists of the Ministry of Defense to the Weizmann Institute. After Ben-Gurion's return to power in 1955, there was a need to begin anew.

The story of "before the beginning" of Israel's nuclear project is fascinating, but it has never been told. Even now, almost fifty years later, much of it is still unavailable to historians. The IAEC files are sealed in toto, forbidden to outside historians. The same is true regarding the IDF/Ministry of Defense archives, where HEMED files dealing with nuclear energy are still classified and not available to researchers. The living memory of those early events and decisions is also disappearing. Some of the significant protagonists are no longer alive, others who are alive prefer not to discuss those events (for reasons which go far beyond matters of national security). In any case, human memory is both fragile and selective. These are serious limitations. The narrative I offer, then, is by its nature incomplete and interpretative. Like all narratives, it is not written from God's-eye view; rather, it is a story told through incomplete human and archival sources.

Notwithstanding those limitations, new archival and oral material is available to sketch a narrative of "before the beginning." The narrative presented here is multi-faceted and multi-focused. It tells of personality and ideological clashes, of different approaches to nationally-sponsored science in early 1950s Israel, and ultimately of the will and determination to found a national nuclear project without even a clear understanding of what such a project entails. It is a story about a tiny new state, born out of its war of independence and facing the lack of resources in every area of living, whose leaders had the ignorance and chutzpah [boldness; cheek] to fantasize the impossible. All in all, it is a story...