Abstract
Israel and the Bomb By Avner Cohen, Columbia University Press, 470 pages; $27.50
Avner Cohen: Smart, tenacious, obsessive. I first met him in 1993 at a conference in Chicago. Cohen said he was working on a history of Israel's nuclear weapons program, and then he described in copious detail precisely where he was on the project.
Although Cohen is an historian, he reminded me of the best journalists I had known over my 30 years in the news business. Good journalists are persistent; the best are pit bulls. They never let go. They are the Ida Tarbells, the Henry Morton Stanleys, the Woodwards and the Bernsteins, the people whose reporting stirs things up and sometimes inspires change.
But for every Woodward and Bernstein, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, whose obsession with compiling every fact about a story, exploring every nuance, covering every angle means they never quite get the thing done, or they describe all the trees without ever quite seeing the forest. Over the years, I wondered whether Cohen would fall into that trap.
“You have a comfortable home, three beautiful children, a husband who is devoted to you–what could you possibly want with nuclear capability?
The answer came last fall with the publication of Israel and the Bomb. Lawrence Korb, writing in the New York Times, said: “Cohen has achieved the impossible. With Israel and the Bomb, he has written a scholarly treatise that includes over 1,200 footnotes, yet reads like a novel.”
Cohen's writing is clear and compelling, but novelistic it is not. Nonetheless, Korb is close to target in saying that Cohen achieved the “impossible.” Cohen has written a near-definitive work on the history of a secret and heavily censored weapons program that the Israeli government scarcely acknowledges.
Readers of the Bulletin are familiar with the rough outlines of Israel's program, in part because of Cohen's past articles. (The most recent: “And Then There Was One” in the September/October 1998 issue.) Bulletin readers know how David Ben Gurion, the founding father of Israel, became the father of the nuclear program; how Shimon Peres, Ben Gurion's protégé, put the program fully on track; and how Lev Eshkol, Israel's third prime minister, authored the famously vague statement, “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”
Israeli proponents of that formulation argue that it has contributed to keeping the peace in the Middle East. Although everyone “knows” that Israel has a nuclear deterrent, goes the conventional wisdom, the failure to proclaim it publicly means that Arab leaders are not backed into corners and forced to pursue their own bomb programs.
Nonetheless, nuclear ambiguity–or “opacity” to use the more rigorous term favored by Cohen–has enormously complicated U.S.-Israeli relations over the decades. The Eisenhower administration suspected that Israel had a bomb program, but left office before it could fully check the matter out. President Kennedy was haunted by the prospect of global nuclear proliferation, and he believed that an Israel with nuclear weapons would destabilize a volatile region. Nevertheless, his administration could not quite get a handle on whether Israel was actually going nuclear, in large part because the Israelis dissembled at the highest levels.
President Johnson was determined to leave the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty as a legacy, and he sorely wanted Israel to come into the NPT as a non-nuclear weapon state. Although some Israeli leaders favored that, in the end Israel would not do it. In the uneasy context of the Middle East, it wanted to keep its options open.
“This man is from the National Security Agency, Keith. He wants to talk to you about show and tell.”
At one point in November 1968, Paul Warnke, then an assistant secretary of defense for international security (and the author of a book review on page 69), had an extraordinarily frustrating exchange with Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's ambassador to the United States: The problem, said Warnke, was that the United States could not quite figure out what Israel meant by saying it would “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the area.”
“It means what we have said,” said Rabin in diplomatic doublespeak, “namely, that we would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons.” But, asked Warnke, what specifically did “introduce” mean?
“You are more familiar with these things than we are,” Rabin replied. “What is your definition of nuclear weapons?”
If a nation had components that could be assembled to make a nuclear weapon, that was a nuclear weapon, said Warnke. As to the meaning of “introduction”–that was an Israeli term and the Israelis would have to define it.
“Do you consider a nuclear weapon one that has not been tested, and has been done by a country without previous experience?” asked Rabin.
“Certainly,” said Warnke.
But all the existing nuclear powers, protested Rabin, had tested nuclear weapons. “Do you really believe introduction comes before testing?”
And so, somewhere during the long and obscure dance of words that has passed for U.S.-Israeli diplomacy regarding matters nuclear, the thing was finally resolved. The Israelis believed that as long as they did not test their weapons, they had not “introduced” them; they had preserved ambiguity.
The United States has lived with that wink-and-a-nod formulation for 30 years, with varying degrees of discomfort, particularly when Arab leaders speak of a “double standard.” It is okay for Israel to possess a nuclear arsenal, possibly numbering in the low hundreds; but it is not okay for an Arab nation to have so much as one nuclear weapon.
Cohen–an Israeli citizen and thus subject to Israel's military censorship–works in the United States, where he published his book, in part to escape Israeli censorship. He says he “surveyed” more than a million documents in the United States and Israel and conducted some 150 interviews, a few lasting days. The project consumed 10 years of his life.
And on line …
Avner Cohen is a senior research fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington. Facsimile copies of hundreds of original documents that Cohen used in his research are on the archive's web site (www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/israel).
But the book he produced is unlike anything ever written about Israel's nuclear weapons program in scope and detail, and it has created a modest splash in Israel, at least among those who have seen it. A recent editorial in the prestigious newspaper Ha'aretz praised Cohen for keeping at it even though he “received both direct and indirect messages that persisting with his research and publication could land him in trouble with the law.”
The time has come, said the editorial, for Israel to “take a mature look at and hold public debate on the nuclear program, which in the past was considered the Holy of Holies of security. … Clinging to the tradition of secrecy and confidentiality may have been appropriate for the early years of the state, but today it prevents a public debate on a central, vital issue and harms freedom of expression and research.”
Just so. That is why Cohen wrote the book, to encourage public debate. That is why he so obsessively explored every detail and nuance of the program's history; that is why he devoted 10 years of his life to it. Although he believes that Israel is justified in having a nuclear deterrent, he cannot abide the fact that in a nation he cherishes, debate on such an important matter is largely beyond the pale.