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CHAPTER THREE The Israeli Paradigm: American Controlled Opacity? The second Eisenhower Administration was confronted with two cases of covert proliferation: the French case and the Israeli case. Although one generally associates Kennedy with the nonproliferation program, actually the first serious crisis between Washington and Jerusalem in this regard took place under Eisenhower. Kennedy inherited the problems of both France and Israel. He also took over the problem of West German Gaullism, which, however, could have given him a major trump card vis-a-vis the Soviets. The sharing of nuclear weapons with West Germany was, for Moscow, an unmitigated disaster , and using it as a bargaining chip could have prevented the Soviets from dangerous acts of a similar nature with their own clients. In the early 1960s, the two other major problems looming in the horizon were first China, and in relation to it, India. We do not know when the United States learned of the Chinese nuclear effort, but once evidence was received, it caused grave deliberations in Washington, and some kind of common action with Moscow was considered. Washington also had to deal with India's response to the Chinese challenge, and to take seriously Nehru's open warnings that India would not tolerate a world dominated by the nuclear superpowers . Delhi's demands for superpower self-restraint in this and other fields played a role in delaying an already agreed upon United Nationssponsored formula on banning proliferation in the early 1960s; the NonProliferation Treaty (NPT) itself and the superpower monopoly inherent in it were later described by Indira Gandhi as "nuclear apartheid."1 Information about American deliberations regarding China and 41 42 The Politics and Strategy of Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East India, the early history of the NPT, and the establishment of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1957 can be deduced from the sanitized and censored documentation available in the Library of Congress and in Kennedy's and Johnson's presidential libraries. There must have been connections between the West German nuclear sharing problem, the nonaligned position (in regard to the proliferation problem at that time), and the Israeli nuclear program. Obviously, we will concentrate on the Israeli aspect. At least the Limited Test Ban Treaty (LTBT) of 1963 signified a growing degree of understanding between the superpowers, and one may speculate that the LTBT played a role in making Israel's nuclear option less visible a little later, when BenGurion 's successor, Levi Eshkol, officially endorsed it.2 As one can readily see, the French and the Chinese were left to pursue their own ways. The latter exploded their first bomb in 1964. India, meanwhile, was building reactors supplied by Canada for "peaceful use" in the spirit of Eisenhower's Atoms for Peace program. This program was the positive side of the nonproliferation concept of the time, and its general premises were also used later to resolve, for appearances ' sake, the crisis with Israel. In this respect, Indian and Israeli behavior seems to have been rather similar; they both claimed their reactors were for peaceful use. Actually, though, their means of acquiring nuclear potential, their motives, and the final results of their efforts, including their relations with Washington, were different. India's case will be discussed briefly in Chapter 13. However, at the outset of our historical review of Israel's opacity, we should mention that India's introduction into nuclear weapons development involved deceiving its suppliers-an act that might have been inspired by India's self-image as a great power and by China's nuclear challenge. India acquired its reactors directly from antiproliferation powers within the framework of their norms prohibiting the use of those reactors for arms development. First Canada, then the United States, supplied reactors to India after 1969, and Indianbuilt units were later added. In contrast Israel's nuclear acquisition, according to our French sources, began with a modest cooperation agreement with France in the early 1950s, at a time when nonproliferation was not yet even an accepted international norm, much less cemented in the NPT.3 In fact, this relationship almost preceded the birth of the IAEA itself. The French, themselves, who had pioneered nuclear research for peaceful use, began their scientific-industrial effort immediately following the Manhattan Project, in which several French scientists were involved in Canada. In the mid-1950s, the French were able to construct The Israeli Paradigm 43 natural-uranium-plus-heavy-water reactors to produce plutonium and separation or reprocessing...

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