History Re-Visited

Recently released U.S. and British national archives have revealed some interesting historical incidents that might otherwise have been forgotten, but whose revelations reawaken a controversy, long dormant. The secretive and troubling-to-its-allies maneuvering of the State of Israel to achieve its own nuclear weapons arsenal in a secret desert location, with the aid of the French. Near the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert, the Dimona nuclear reactor was built.

And 80 tons of uranium oxide "yellowcake" had been provided by Argentina at a price, to the fledgling state, enabling it to transform the matter into fissionable material through reprocessing to produce plutonium. And it was Canada, in the spring of 1964 where an intelligence report surfaced revealing these details. The U.S. and its allies had a suspicion that Israel was in pursuit of its own nuclear weapons program.

And Canada supplied the confirmation through an Ottawa-based defence scientist, Jacob Koop who worked at the Defence Research Board as a career intelligence analyst. He prepared a detailed analysis of Dimona's potential as a military nuclear site, concluding that Israel had gathered to itself all the "prerequisites for commencing a modest nuclear weapons development project."

"These nearly unknown documents shed light on one of the most obscure aspects of Israel's nuclear history -- how secretly and vigorously Israel sought raw materials for its nuclear program and how persistently it tried to cultivate relations with certain nuclear suppliers. The story of the Argentine yellowcake sale to Israel has remained largely unknown in part because Israel has gone to great lengths to keep tight secrecy to this day about how and where it acquired raw materials for its nuclear program.
"The Canadian government was interested in the Israeli nuclear program from its very inception. When Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion met Prime Minister John Diefenbaker on May 25, 1961, Dimona was at the centre of the discussion... (and) Ben-Gurion pledged that the Dimona project was peaceful." 

So wrote William Burr, of the National Security Archive, and Avner Cohen, of the James Martin Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, in an introduction to the archival find. In a sense, the Dimona project was peaceful in its intent. For though it did produce success for Israel in becoming a nuclear-weapons-owning nation, those weapons have never been used, just as they have never been officially acknowledged.

Hypocrisy of the highest order -- scream Israel's opponents -- to fault Iran for having the same intentions and pulling out all international and United Nations interventions to bring a halt to the Islamic Republic's secret underground nuclear stations and their feverish uranium enrichment programs, pairing with the ongoing engineering of more precise, longer-range ICBMs.

India and Pakistan too had their secret programs, and it is quite possible that the two countries represent an existential danger to one another. Their aggravated agitation against each other, particularly by Pakistan against India over sovereignty of Kashmir, for example, may once have led them both close to deploying their weapons.

The United States once did, against Nagasaki and Hiroshima as the close of the Second World War. And came close again, during the U.S.-Russia-Cuba standoff after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion by the U.S., in 1962. Both John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev exercised a disastrous game of "chicken", which might have resulted in an unspeakable holocaust.

Iran has spoken openly and unabashedly about its contempt and hatred for the State of Israel, and its intention of removing it from the geography of the Middle East. It has made these statements numerous times, and even during fora of the United Nations, where no united front denouncing the appalling horror of such statements ever surfaced from that august body.

It seems clear enough that if Iran -- a country that terrorizes its own citizens and funds and encourages terrorism elsewhere -- gained possession of such weapons it would plan to use them.

Israel, from striving to acquire such technology in the 1960s, to its success in mastering the technology and producing the weapons it will not reveal it possesses, has never used them. Their possession has a deterrent quality and nothing else.

When Israel was challenged by a collectivity of Arab armies determined to finally destroy its presence in the Middle East during the 1967 six-day (Yom Kippur) war, even when it was vastly outnumbered, it relied on the courage of its own military and conventional weaponry.