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THE SAMSON OPTION: ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR ARSENAL AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY |
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Chapter 2: The Scientist The scientific father of the Israeli bomb, its J. Robert Oppenheimer, was a slight, pale, chain-smoking scientist named Ernst David Bergmann, a rabbi's son who was a refugee from Nazi Germany. The international scientific community came to know Bergmann after Israel's successful War of Independence in 1948 -- the first Arab-Israeli War -- as a brilliant organic chemist and director of the chemistry division at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel's preeminent research facility. He was chairman of Israel's Atomic Energy Commission, set up in 1952, and, on those few occasions when he appeared in public, an outspoken advocate of nuclear research for peaceful purposes. Cigarette constantly in hand, Bergmann was a picture of charm and wit at international conferences on nuclear science. His high intelligence seemed obvious. So did Israel's need for nuclear power: there would be no oil available for purchase from Arab neighbors. By 1947, Bergmann was telling friends that the large phosphate fields in the Negev desert contained meager, but recoverable, traces of natural uranium. Within two years, a department of isotope research was established at the Weizmann Institute and young Israeli scientists were being sent abroad to study the new fields of nuclear energy and nuclear chemistry. A joint research program also was begun with the nascent French Atomic Energy Commission. By 1953, Israeli researchers at Weizmann had pioneered a new process for creating heavy water, needed to modulate a nuclear chain reaction, as well as devising a more efficient means of extracting uranium from phosphate fields. In November 1954, Bergmann introduced himself to the Israeli citizenry in a radio address and reported on Israel's progress in peaceful nuclear research. He announced-two years after the fact-that an Israeli Atomic Energy Commission had been established. The next year Israel signed an agreement with the United States, under the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace program, for cooperation in the civilian uses of atomic energy. Washington helped finance and fuel a small nuclear reactor for research, located at Nahal Soreq, south of Tel Aviv. The agreement called for the United States to have inspection rights to the small reactor under the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, which provided for an Israeli guarantee, to be verified by inspections, that the nuclear materials would not be diverted to weapons research. These were years in which David Ben-Gurion-Israel's white-maned "Old Man," who served, with one brief interlude, as prime minister and defense minister from 1948 to 1963-repeatedly bragged to visitors that Israel would build its own atomic reactor, utilizing its own natural uranium and locally manufactured heavy water. Nuclear energy, Ben-Gurion promised, would soon be producing the electricity and creating the desalinated water needed to make the Negev desert bloom. Bergmann's dream of nuclear power plants was sincere, but it also amounted to a totally effective cover for his drive to develop the bomb. Ben-Gurion was the man in charge of all of this, with the aid of his brilliant young protege Shimon Peres, who was thirty years old when Ben-Gurion appointed him director general of the ministry of defense in late 1953. Bergmann's Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, as the public was not told in the radio address, was under the direct jurisdiction of Peres and the defense ministry. Nuclear power was not Ben-Gurion's first priority; the desert would glow before it bloomed. These three men would find an international ally to help create the bomb and, equally important, would accept from the beginning that the bomb would have to be privately financed by wealthy American and European Jews who shared their dream of an ultimate deterrent for Israel. Any other approach would make the bomb impossible to keep secret. *** Israel's nuclear bomb ambitions in the early 1950s were not foreseen in Cold War Washington. The United States was preoccupied with the Korean War, economic and social conditions in Europe, the strength of the Communist Party in France and Italy, fears of internal Communist subversion, and the continuing political battle with the Soviet Union. There were crises in the Middle East, too. Egypt's corrupt King Farouk was overthrown in a coup in 1952, and a radical new leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, emerged in 1954 as premier. British troops, after a stay of more than seventy years in Egypt, were on their way out of North Africa. So were the French. By 1955 the French government was facing insurrection from three former colonies, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Morocco and Tunisia would gain their independence by 1956, but Algeria, whose opposition National Liberation Front (FLN) was strongly supported by Nasser, became the main event. The bloody war, with its 250,000 dead, came close to destroying France over the next five years and provided inspiration to Arab revolutionaries throughout the Middle East. Nasser, with his talk of Pan-Arabism, also rattled the Israelis, who instinctively turned to the United States. American Jews were Israel's lifeline: hundreds of millions of American dollars were pouring in every year. Ben-Gurion had tried for years to join in a regional security pact with Washington-to somehow be included under the American nuclear umbrella- with no success. Israel had publicly supported the American position in the Korean War and secretly went a step further: Ben-Gurion offered to send Israeli troops to fight alongside the United Nations' forces in South Korea. [1] President Harry S. Truman said no, apparently in fear of backing into a security arrangement with Israel. The United States, England, and France had agreed in their 1950 Tripartite Agreement that all three nations would maintain the status quo in the Middle East by not providing any significant quantity of military equipment to Arabs or Israelis. The Eisenhower administration came into office in 1953 with no intention of changing the policy. Israel tried, nonetheless, to establish some kind of a special relationship with President Eisenhower, with no luck. In the mid-1950s, a year-long series of renewed talks on a mutual security treaty with Washington went nowhere. At one point, as Ben-Gurion told his biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, he considered offering Eisenhower American bases in Israel in return for a security commitment. That idea was dropped when the talks faltered. There were equally unsuccessful strategems to purchase fighter planes and other weapons, but Eisenhower essentially maintained the 1950 embargo on arms sales to Israel throughout the eight years of his presidency. The effect was to limit America's influence in the Middle East and deny Washington a chance to have an impact on Israeli foreign policy. The policy suited the men around Eisenhower, many of them Wall Street lawyers who thought that America's oil supply would be jeopardized by arms trafficking with Israel. Ben-Gurion's private nightmare in these years-as his close aides knew-was of a second Holocaust, this time at the hands of the Arabs. Israel's only security, Ben-Gurion repeatedly warned, would come through self-defense and self-reliance. "What is Israel?" he was quoted by an aide as asking. "... Only a small spot. One dot! How can it survive in this Arab world?" Ben-Gurion believed that he understood Arab character and was persuaded that as long as Arabs thought they could destroy the Jewish state, there would be no peace and no recognition of Israel. Many Israelis, survivors of the Holocaust, came to believe in ein brera, or "no alternative," the doctrine that Israel was surrounded by implacable enemies and therefore had no choice but to strike out. In their view, Hitler and Nasser were interchangeable. For these Israelis, a nuclear arsenal was essential to the survival of the state. In public speeches throughout the 1950s, Ben-Gurion repeatedly linked Israel's security to its progress in science. "Our security and independence require that more young people devote themselves to science and research, atomic and electronic research, research of solar energy . . . and the like," he told the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, in November 1955. Ernst Bergmann explicitly articulated the ein brera fears in a letter two years later: "I am convinced , . , that the State of Israel needs a defense research program of its own, so that we shall never again be as lambs led to the slaughter." Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, and Ernst Bergmann believed that Israel's independent arsenal finally could provide what President Eisenhower would not-the nuclear umbrella. *** No outsider-not the international scientific community, the Israeli public, nor American intelligence-could understand the significance of Bergmann's two other government portfolios in the early 1950s: as scientific adviser to the minister of defense and as director of research and planning for the defense ministry. The Israelis in charge of those posts knew Bergmann to be the most uncompromising and effective advocate for nuclear weapons, the man most directly responsible-along with the French-for Israel's status by the end of the 1960s as a nuclear-weapons state. Bergmann and the French not only got it done in the Negev desert, but they .kept it secret, just as J. Robert Oppenheimer and his colleagues had kept the Manhattan Project undiscovered in the desert at Los Alamos. The young Bergmann had been introduced in the early 1920s to the world of the atom as a student of organic chemistry at the Emil Fischer Institute of the University of Berlin. He was on the fringe of a circle of eminent scientists, including Ernest Rutherford in England and Marie Curie of France, who were the cutting edge of what would become an international race in the prewar years to unravel the mystery of nuclear fission. Bergmann's colleagues in Berlin included Herman F. Mark, an Austrian who later became an eminent chemist and dean of the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (and whose son, Hans M., served as secretary of the Air Force in the Carter administration). [2] "We were not theoreticians," recalled Mark, who during his career published twenty books and more than five hundred papers on polymer science. "We were interested in making things. The important thing for us was synthetics. First you have to make something nobody else has-and then you can use it." While in Berlin, Bergmann and Mark worked together and published joint papers on the chemical structure of rubber, paint, and adhesives. Bergmann's father was one of the most eminent rabbis in Berlin and a close friend of Chaim Weizmann, the Russian- Jewish biochemist and Zionist then living in England. In 1933, when a series of sweeping Nazi decrees made it impossible for Bergmann or any other Jew to continue in an academic job in Germany, Weizmann arranged for young Bergmann to join him On the faculty at Manchester University in England, where he continued his research on synthetics and his close association with those scientists racing to split the atom. Like Weizmann, Bergmann came to the attention of Frederick A. Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, a German-born Oxford scientist who became Winston Churchill's chief science adviser in the years before World War II. Little is known of Bergmann's defense work for the British before the war; it is in those years that he first became involved with the defense of Palestine. One of the Weizmann biographies reports that the Hagannah, the military arm of the Zionist movement in Palestine, asked Weizmann in 1936 for a chemist to help produce an effective high explosive for use in the underground war against the Arabs and the British. Dynamite was far too dangerous to handle in the climate of the Middle East. Weizmann assigned the mission to Bergmann, who got it done and then signed on as a member of the Hagannah's technical committee. In 1939, the biography adds, Bergmann traveled to Paris on behalf of the Hagannah and shared his findings with the French, whose army was then operating in North Africa. Bergmann left England shortly after Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939. Weizmann had intervened once again and found him a job with old friends who owned a chemistry laboratory in Philadelphia. It didn't work out, and another old friend from Germany, Herman Mark, came to his rescue: "He had no space. So we invited him to come to Brooklyn." Mark had been driven out of Europe in 1938 and ended up doing research for a Canadian paper company in Ontario. By 1940 he was running a laboratory at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn; two years later he became dean of faculty and turned the institute into a haven for Jewish refugees, including Chaim Weizmann. "The whole gang came to America," said Mark, who, when interviewed for this book, was the sole known survivor of that period. With the defeat of Hitler, there was one final migration for Bergmann: to Palestine to help establish what would become the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot, south of Tel Aviv. Israeli ambitions seemed unlimited. Oppenheimer and his colleagues in the Manhattan Project, including John von Neumann, the mathematician and early computer theoretician, were being wooed-unsuccessfully-by Weizmann as early as 1947, and were repeatedly asked to spend time doing research in Israel. [3] Bergmann was Weizmann's first choice to become director of the institute, but Weizmann's wife, Vera, successfully objected on the oldest of grounds: she was offended at Bergmann's longstanding affair with Hani, her husband's private secretary (whom Bergmann eventually married). [4] Bergmann instead was named head of the organic chemistry division. He could take solace, if needed, at the eminence of his colleagues. Amos Deshalit, who headed the physics division, subsequently was considered a quantum researcher in a class with Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr, the Danish Nobel Prize winner. Inorganic chemistry was directed by Aharon Katchalsky, later Katzir, who was a specialist in the electrolytic properties of chain molecules and a pioneer researcher in the related field of muscle-powered robotics. (Like Bergmann, Katzir had a secret life: at his death in 1972, he was one of the driving forces in the then flourishing Israeli nuclear weapons program.) There was one final move for Bergmann, at Ben-Gurion's request, after Israel's Independence in 1948--to the ministry of defense, where, under Shimon Peres, Bergmann established the nation's first institute for defense research. More than forty years later, Peres would tell an Israeli newspaper reporter that Bergmann, even in 1948, was constantly speaking about a missile capability for Israel. "I might be ready to tell the full truth about him in one hundred years, maybe," Peres added. "We worked thirteen years together, perhaps the best years of my life." *** Without Bergmann, insisted Herman Mark, there would have been no Israeli bomb: "He was in charge of every kind of nuclear activity in Israel. He was the man who completely understood it [nuclear fission], and then he explained it to other people." Mark became a constant commuter between Brooklyn and Israel after World War II, serving on planning boards and as a scientific adviser to the fledgling Weizmann Institute. He remained close to Bergmann and shared his view of the inevitability of Israeli nuclear weapons research: "We were both of the same opinion-that eventually Israel has to be in full cognizance and knowledge of what happens in nuclear physics. Look, a new type of chemical reaction was discovered at Los Alamos. Whether it's desalination, a power plant, or a bomb makes no difference-it's still fission." Bergmann had made the same point in a 1966 interview -- after he was forced out of government service-with an Israeli newspaper: "It's very important to understand that by developing atomic energy for peaceful uses, you reach the nuclear option. There are no two atomic energies." That interview, nine years before his death, was as close as Bergmann ever came to publicly discussing the bomb. "Bergmann was anxious, rightly so," said Mark, "that there shouldn't be too much talk. It was super-secret-just like the Manhattan Project." There was at least one early occasion, however, when Bergmann couldn't resist sharing what he knew. Abraham Feinberg, a wealthy New York businessman and ardent advocate of statehood for Israel, was one of Ben-Gurion's most important and trusted allies in the United States. By 1947, Feinberg was playing a major-and highly discreet-role in fund- raising and White House lobbying for Israel as well as for the Democratic Party. He would operate at the highest levels between Washington and Jerusalem for the next two decades. Bergmann was in New York that fall and, as usual, joined Abe Feinberg and his family at Friday-night synagogue services; the group would later return to Feinberg's apartment. "Bergmann was always hungry," recalled Feinberg. "He loved my wife's scrambled eggs." One night over dinner, added Feinberg, "Bergmann's eyes lit up and he said, 'There's uranium in the desert.'" There was no question about the message-that a path was now cleared for Israel to develop the atomic bomb. Feinberg was astonished at such indiscreet talk: "I shushed him up." *** Israel's needs in the late 1940s and early 1950s coincided perfectly with France's. Both nations were far from having any technical capacity to build a bomb, nor was there any internal consensus that a bomb was desirable. Ben-Gurion, Peres, and Bergmann would spend much of their careers engaged in a bitter fight inside the Israeli government over their dreams of a nuclear weapons program. Most senior members of the ruling Mapai (Israel Workers') Party viewed an Israeli bomb as suicidal, too expensive, and too reminiscent of the horrors that had been inflicted on the Jews in World War II. The French debate revolved around the Cold War. France's high commissioner for nuclear matters, Frederic Joliot-Curie, a Nobel laureate who had done important research in nuclear physics before the war, was a member of the Communist Party who was opposed to a French role in NATO and any French link to nuclear weapons. In 1950, he was the first to sign the Stockholm Appeal, a Soviet-backed petition calling for a ban on all nuclear weapons. French scientists, despite extensive involvement in prewar nuclear fission research, had been excluded from a major role in the American and British bomb programs of World War II, and Joliot-Curie's politics kept France isolated. Joliot-Curie was dismissed after signing the Stockholm Appeal, and he was eventually replaced by Pierre Guillaumat, who had served during the war with the French secret intelligence service, and Francis Perrin, a Joliot associate who in 1939 had been the first to publish a formula for calculating the critical mass of uranium-the amount needed to sustain a chain reaction. The French plowed ahead with no help from the United States, which viewed France's Atomic Energy Commission as being riddled with Soviet agents. Perrin also was important to the Israeli connection. A socialist who fled to England in 1940 at the fall of France, he became friendly with Bergmann-how the two met is not known-and traveled to Tel Aviv in 1949. It was after that visit that some Israeli scientists were permitted to attend Saclay, the newly set up French national atomic research center near Versailles, and participate in the construction of Saclay's small experimental reactor. It was a learning experience for the nuclear scientists of both countries. In an unpublished interview with an American graduate student in 1969, Bergmann spoke elliptically of the ambitions he shared with Ben-Gurion and Peres for the French-Israeli connection: "We felt that Israel ... needed to collaborate with a country close to its own technical level. First it was important to train Israeli experts. Then we would decide exactly what sort of collaboration to seek and what kind of contribution could be made in a joint endeavor, considering Israel's capacities and resources. Every effort was to be made to keep cooperation from being entirely one-directional." A critical decision for France, and thus Israel, came in 1951 when, over the objections of Perrin, Guillaumat authorized the construction of a natural uranium-fueled reactor capable of producing, after chemical reprocessing, about twenty-two pounds of weapons-grade plutonium a year. The chain reaction would be moderated by graphite, a technique used by the United States and the Soviet Union in their huge plutonium- producing reactors. Surveyors had found large deposits of natural uranium a few years earlier near Limoges, in central France, and that discovery made it easy for Guillaumat and Perrin to discard an alternative method for powering the reactor- using uranium that had been artificially enriched. Enriched fuel, if available at all, would have to be imported, since French technicians did not yet know how to enrich natural uranium. But relying on foreign suppliers-and inevitable international controls-would rob France of any chance to achieve its basic goal of atomic independence. "France," Charles de Gaulle wrote in his World War II memoirs, "cannot be France without greatness." The decision to produce weapons-grade plutonium would irrevocably propel France down the road to a nuclear bomb, as Guillaumat, Perrin, and the Israelis had to know-but the French public and its military leaders did not. Construction began the next year at Marcoule, in the southern Rhone Valley. Saint-Gobain Techniques Nouvelles (SGN), a large chemical company, subsequently was granted a contract to build a chemical reprocessing plant on the grounds at Marcoule. Such plants are the critical element in the making of a bomb. The natural uranium, once burned, or irradiated, in the reactor, breaks down into uranium, plutonium, and highly toxic wastes. The irradiated fuel needs to be transported, cooled, and then treated before the plutonium can be separated and purified. These steps can be accomplished only by remote control and in a specially built separate facility-the reprocessing plant-containing elaborate and very expensive physical protection for the work force. Bergmann's men were able to contribute to all of this. There was renewed controversy inside Israel over the constantly expanding Israeli presence in France, but Ben-Gurion held firm. "In 1952," Shimon Peres told an Israeli interviewer, "I was alone as favoring the building of an Israeli nuclear option. I ... felt terrible. Everyone was opposed-only Ben-Gurion said, 'You'll see, it will be okay.' There were people who went to Ben-Gurion and told him, 'Don't listen to Shimon; he and Bergmann are spinning tales. Israel won't be able to launch a project like this.' They said, 'Buy from the Canadians, from the Americans.' But I wanted the French, because Bergmann was well known among the community of French atomic scientists." French officials reciprocated the Israeli trust: Israeli scientists were the only foreigners allowed access throughout the secret French nuclear complex at Marcoule. Israelis were said to be able to roam "at will." One obvious reason for the carte blanche was the sheer brilliance of the Israeli scientists and their expertise, even then, in computer technology. The French would remain dependent for the next decade-the first French nuclear test took place in 1960 -- on Israeli computer skills. A second reason for the Israeli presence at Marcoule was emotional: many French officials and scientists had served in the resistance and maintained intense feelings about the Holocaust. And many of France's leading nuclear scientists were Jewish and strong supporters of the new Jewish state, which was emerging-to the delight of these men-as France's closest ally in the Middle East. No Frenchman had stronger emotional ties to Israel than Bertrand Goldschmidt, a nuclear chemist who had served during World War II with the handful of French scientists who were permitted-despite being foreigners-to work directly with the Americans doing nuclear research. He had become an expert in the chemistry of plutonium and plutonium extraction. He also had helped build an experimental reactor fueled with natural uranium and moderated by heavy water. As a first-rate chemist, he had been offered a chance to stay in the American bomb program after the war, but instead chose to return to France and join its Atomic Energy Commission. After intense negotiations, American security officials permitted him to do so, but refused to release him from his wartime pledge of secrecy. "It was tacitly understood," Goldschmidt subsequently wrote, "that we could use our knowledge to benefit France by giving information to our research teams, but without publishing and only to the extent necessary for the progress of our work. That was a reasonable compromise -- and one that was quickly disregarded. Goldschmidt was a Jew whose family had suffered, as had most Jewish families in Europe, during the war. His ties to Israel were heightened by marriage; his wife was a member of the eminent Rothschild banking family, whose contributions to Israel and Jewish causes were measured in the tens of millions of dollars. Goldschmidt and his wife had made the pilgrimage to Israel in the early 1950s and been taken by Ernst Bergmann for a memorable meeting with Ben- Gurion at his frame home in the Negev. [5] By then, Goldschmidt was serving as director of chemistry for France's Atomic Energy Commission; in the 1970S he would become a widely respected French spokesman on nonproliferation and other international atomic energy issues. He also was among the few outsiders permitted to visit the completed reactor at Dimona in the 1960s-then a classic example of illicit proliferation. "We weren't really helping them [the Israelis]," Goldschmidt explained years later. "We were just letting them know what we knew-without knowing where it would lead. We didn't know ourselves how difficult it would be." The important fact to understand, he added, with some discomfort, is that "in the. fifties and sixties having a nuclear weapon was considered a good thing-something to be congratulated for. Not like the stigma it is now." By 1953, the scientific team at the Weizmann Institute had developed the improved ion exchange mechanism for producing heavy water and a more efficient method for mining uranium. [6] Both concepts were sold to the French; the sales led to a formal agreement for cooperation in nuclear research that was signed by the two nations. Goldschmidt recalled that Bergmann himself came to France to negotiate the mining sale with Pierre Guillaumat. He demanded 100 million francs for the new process, but refused to describe it fully in advance, claiming that if he did so it would lose half its value. There was an impasse. Finally, said Goldschmidt, "Guillaumat told me, 'I have the greatest respect for those people,' and we bargained." Bergmann settled for sixty million francs. Israel would remain on a cash-and-carry basis with the French in its nuclear dealings. _______________ Notes: 1. Israel's position on the Korean War enraged Moscow and led to a rupture in diplomatic relations. The Soviet Union, which had been the first nation to recognize the State of Israel in 1948, would for the next thirty years castigate Israel for its "racist and discriminatory" treatment of Palestinians and ties to American "imperialism." 2. Herman Mark was ninety-five years old when interviewed in 1990 at his son's home in Austin, Texas. Hans Mark, then chancellor of the University of Texas, was himself no stranger to the world of intelligence and nuclear weapons. As Air Force secretary, he also wore what is known in the government as the "black hat": he was head of the executive committee, or Ex-Com, of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a most-secret unit that is responsible for the development, procurement, and targeting of America's intelligence satellites. As a nuclear physicist, Hans Mark had worked for twelve years beginning in 1955 for the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, one of America's main nuclear weapons facilities. For four of those years he served as a division leader in experimental physics. 3. Oppenheimer's personal papers, on file at the Library of Congress, show that he went to Israel in May 1958 to participate in ceremonies marking the opening of the Institute of Nuclear Science in Rehovot. He also took a military flight with Bergmann and Shimon Peres to visit the port city of Elat at the southern reach of the Negev, according to newspaper reports at the time. Israeli officials who worked in 1958 at Dimona. then in the early stages of construction, recall no visit then or in later years by Oppenheimer. 4. It was Bergmann's second missed opportunity to direct a Weizmann research institute. Weizmann had been instrumental in the 1930s in setting up Palestine's first research facility, the Daniel Sieff Institute. According to Shimon Peres, Weizmann approached Albert Einstein, then teaching at Princeton, and asked him to recommend one of his students to run the institute. Einstein instead suggested Bergmann, who didn't get the job for reasons not known. 5. "We had a long discussion about atomic energy," Goldschmidt recalls. "Ben-Gurion asked me how long would it take [for nuclear desalinization] to make the Negev desert bloom?"-a favorite Ben-Gurion question. "I said fifteen years. He started scolding me and said if we brought in all the Jewish scientists we could do it much faster." 6. Israel's much-ballyhooed breakthrough in heavy-water production, which involved distillation rather than the previously used electrolysis method, was a disappointment, however. The procedure did produce heavy water far more easily and much more cheaply than other methods, as advertised, but also much more slowly.
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