Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviet Nuclear Gamble in the Six Day War (review)

The authors argue that the USSR deliberately instigated the crisis and war of 1967; that it did so in the context of blocking Israel’s nuclear program; and that it committed Soviet personnel and weapons for a direct military intervention on behalf of the Arabs.

According to the authors the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Levi Eshkol, was the one who initially—against his own better judgment— instigated the May 1967 crisis, together with Yitzhak Rabin, his Chief of the IDF’s General Staff, who played a role here, each of them operating ona different level.

The authors begin with assurances given by Eshkol’s aide to the Soviets, that the Israeli nuclear program was not ready yet, since this unconventional endeavor, including intermediate ballistic missiles ordered in France, seemed to have triggered Moscow’s wrath. Hence Eshkol and his allies at home (mainly Achdut Ha’avoda nationalist-leftist politicians Yigal Allon and Israel Galili, it should be added here) allowed Moscow to extend a “nuclear guarantee” or umbrella to Egypt, just in case some Israeli atomic bombs were ready, and pushed Nasser to eliminate the Dimona nuclear reactor altogether, if not Israel itself.

Rabin’s part in this drama, whose epilogue would lead years later to the tragedy of his assassination, was purely conventional, aimed at maintaining deterrence vis-à-vis the hostile Arab States and preventing Palestinian guerillas from operating inside Israel from bases in Syria or havens in Jordan. He thus embarked upon a major retaliatory act against the then Jordanian-Palestinian village of Samu’ in November 1966, prompting American wrath and a Palestinian uprising that had to be quelled by force by King Hussein. Rabin thus focused on Soviet-backed, aggressive Syria, whose radical Ba’ath regime was behind the Palestinian incursions into Israel; Damascus also directly fought Jewish farmers working a contested border land by shelling large parts of the Galilee from the Golan Heights. A series of air battles initiated by Rabin, one of which ended by downing Syrian MiGs over Damascus, was followed by open threats made by Rabin in public, to bring about a regime change in Syria. The Soviets thus operated on two levels: while trying to protect their allies in Damascus, they were given a pretext to push President Nasser of Egypt, on the other side of Israel’s borders, to move his army into fortified yet empty positions along the open, hardly protected Israeli southern boarder; later he pushed out UN peacekeepers along his armistice line with Israel in Gaza, and blockaded the straits leading to Israel’s southern port of Eilat.

On the basis of primary sources and former Soviet officials’ memoirs and interviews with Soviet military personnel, the authors describe Brezhnev’s first demanding the withdrawal of the U.S. Sixth Fleet from the Mediterranean, and then assuming an extremely hostile attitude toward Israel. Previously, Eshkol presided over a rogue Israeli intelligence operation in France, which might have driven a furious General de Gaulle to cancel the delivery of French-made medium-range, nuclear-capable missiles scheduled for 1967 or early 1968. Eshkol and his Foreign Minister, Abba Eban, tried their best to find ways to lessen Washington’s criticism of the Israeli nuclear program by allowing (ineffective) American inspection visits at the nuclear facility in Dimona, and also to calm Moscow down. One of these strategies might have been the message conveyed to the Kremlin that the Israeli nuclear program was not operational yet. The authors use various terms in this regard, such as a “deliverable weapon,” which could have been not just the assembled bomb but credible delivery means—in my view the French developed medium-range missile that indeed could cover Soviet territory, and practically every Arab vital target.

The Soviets could further believe, according to our authors, that a ground war might end in a draw but could even so destroy Dimona by...