Instruments of doom: Israel's nukes

No other development has done so much to make the Middle East unstable than Israel's decision to become a major nuclear power, with a wide arsenal of advanced nuclear weapons. Unlike other nations that have considered nuclear weapons for deterrence purpose only and were satisfied with the production of a limited number of atomic weapons, Israel has continued to produce a suite of weapons that can be used to do everything from blunt an armoured attack to annihilate a national capital city.

Israel's pursuit of nuclear capability hasn't been a solo effort. Other countries like France were very involved in making Israel the nuclear power it is today. But, while these countries have provided official, if covert, assistance, Israel has also been involved in the aggressive acquisition of nuclear secrets through espionage, even from its largest sponsor, the United States. There, the large community of Jewish nuclear scientists and the lax security has allowed Israel to pursue a nuclear weapons programme without even paying the economic costs usually associated with such endeavour.

The fact that many of America's nuclear weapons scientists were Jewish and pro-Israel is no secret. The father of the neutron bomb, Sam Cohen, himself a pro-Israel nuclear scientist noted of the scientists at Los Alamos during WW II, "many of them were refugees from Hitler, whose friends and relatives had suffered hideously at his hands and who harboured little affection for the Nazis." On the evening after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer told the assembled nuclear scientists that his biggest regret was that they hadn't completed the bomb in time to use against the Germans. "that brought the house down".

Not only were many of these scientists refugees from Nazi Germany, they were determined that an attack on the Jewish people like that caused by Hitler would never happen again. When Israel became a state a few years later, these scientists saw Israel as that guarantee against another holocaust. And the final guarantee would be a nuclear guarantee. "They were heart and soul with Israel," said Cohen, who worked at Los Alamos during WW II. Nor is there any doubt that Jewish scientists provided Israel with "under the counter" assistance. Later, one scientist from Los Alamos was to go to Israel.

The end of the war had changed the attitude towards secrecy. Cohen, who said that on a scale of one to 10, would charitably grade US nuclear secrecy at five, tells that at the end of the war, many scientists felt that keeping much of the information on the atomic bomb and the science of nuclear fission secret was unethical. Consequently, many papers were published and many documents were passed on to friendly governments, including LA-1, the Los Alamos Primer, which was produced by Serber and gave a general overview of the science and engineering necessary to produce the atomic bomb. Much of the information in this report was declassified in the following years (although LA-1 wasn't declassified until the 1960s). However, it gave Israeli scientists an idea of the challenges to building a nuclear weapon and where they had to focus their efforts.

There were two major engineering problems to producing a nuclear weapon that Israel had to solve; producing the fissile material and creating the explosive lenses necessary to achieve the super critical mass. Both of these secrets were carefully controlled by the US.

Producing the nuclear material was made easier by the post- war alliance between France and Israel. France had been generally excluded from nuclear research and the French government was anxious to gain the same nuclear edge that the Americans, British, and Russians had. Although the French were behind in many areas, the famed Curie laboratory in France had been a pioneer in the separation of radioactive isotopes. In fact, the only substantial French contribution to the Manhattan Project was on plutonium separation. This work by the French Goldschmitt was to become the standard plutonium separation method after the war. This gave them a natural advantage in separating plutonium from spent uranium reactor rods, which became the route towards nuclear weapons for both the French and the Israelis who collaborated with them.

However, composing and shaping the high explosive lenses to make for a super critical mass proved to be a major problem for Israel. In fact, developing the explosive lenses caused many problems for the Manhattan project, and it wasn't until spring 1945 that this problem was solved. It was John Von Neumann, a brilliant Jewish Hungarian mathematician, who solved the problem and showed how to produce a symmetrical shock wave that could compress a mass of fissile material. Without this work, plutonium couldn't be used in a nuclear weapon, nor could scientists accurately predict the reliability of a nuclear device.

This is where the pro-Israel attitudes of the American nuclear weapons team were to help immeasurably. Stories of close friendships between American Jewish nuclear scientists and Israeli counterparts are numerous. Israeli nuclear scientists would visit them at their laboratories and encourage them to visit Israel. Then, in 1957, the Jewish nuclear physicist Raymond Fox left the nuclear weapons design facility at Lawrence Livermore and immigrated to Israel. This nuclear facility specialised in using early computers to model the three dimensional shock waves for explosive lenses. As a result, it became a centre for the development of miniaturised nuclear devices that could be placed in missiles.

That American nuclear scientists were actually guilty of giving the critical secrets of high explosive lenses to Israel is probably only known to Israeli intelligence. But, no one, not even pro-Israeli scientists, dispute the fact that friendly American scientists were critical to giving the Israelis the data and computer codes necessary for modelling and producing explosive lenses. America had been unable to solve this problem without a brilliant mathematician like Von Neumann and Israel didn't have such a person inside their nuclear programme. Yet, the first nuclear weapons developed by the French-Israeli team showed that the American explosive lens data had been used.

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http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/729/re101.htm