The financing had been almost entirely off the books. Much of it had come from a series of donors in the United States recruited by Abraham Feinberg, who had first heard the Negev uranium forecast over scrambled eggs and, according to the historian Avner Cohen, had had a 1958 meeting with Ben-Gurion about securing a stream of funds to be kept separate from the regular military budget. The contributions Feinberg helped raise, totaling an estimated $40 million, were euphemistically said to be dedicated to “special weapons programs.” Fund-raising for Dimona was no ordinary charity work for Feinberg, who reportedly approached at least eighteen people in New York City about the project. This was at the highest level of religious and emotional significance, with the mysterious fission in the reactor core seen as a unique flame for the reborn nation.
“Ben-Gurion called the donors makdishim, or consecrators, and their contributions, hakdasha, consecration,” the historian Michael Karpin has written. “Both of these Hebrew words derive from the word kadosh, sacred, which is also the root of the word Mikdash, or Temple—the holiest institution of Judaism. . . . And like the Temple, which was erected with the contributions of the children of Israel (Exodus 21:1), so too Israel’s nuclear program would be built with contributions. In Ben-Gurion’s eyes, the nuclear project was holy.”
Discovery was inevitable. The CIA routinely examined photographs from U-2 spy planes worldwide and started noticing strange earth-moving patterns near Israel’s “textile plant” almost as soon as construction began. The patterns closely resembled the work the French were doing on their own plutonium facility at Marcoule. When matched with reports that Norway had sold twenty tons of heavy water to Israel, this seemed to point toward an Israeli reactor that ran on natural uranium. Suspicions were relayed to President Eisenhower, who chose to ignore them. But after these reports hit the press in December 1960, Ben-Gurion was obliged to give an official explanation before the national legislature of Israel, the Knesset. He acknowledged that a twenty-five-megawatt nuclear plant had been built at Dimona “for peaceful purposes” and emphatically denied the existence of any plan to manufacture bombs. Two American visitors were given a brief tour and shown blueprints. But they were, in effect, shown nothing.
Before their visit, a particular bank of elevators was bricked over and the new wall concealed with fresh paint and plaster. These elevators were on the top floor of an unremarkable windowless concrete building near the reactor. Eighty feet beneath this building was exactly what the United States had feared: an automated chemical plant for the reprocessing of the plutonium recovered from the fuel rods in the reactor core. The material is highly radioactive and must be stored in sealed boxes full of argon gas; technicians insert their hands into prefitted gloves in order to shape the plutonium into precisely designed warhead components. This six-level facility, known as the Tunnel, was the birthplace of the Israeli bomb.
By the end of 1966, Israel had enough of the pinkish-orange metal to manufacture at least one usable nuclear weapon. Many more, perhaps as many as four hundred, have followed since. But there were no announcements or fanfare, and the bomb was never tested with a detonation. Analysts believe Israel has made multiple “cold tests,” which involve simulating an explosion by testing all of the components separately.
The prime minister who succeeded Ben-Gurion, Levi Eshkol, formulated a policy of “nuclear ambiguity,” or “opacity,” that remains state doctrine today. In short, Israel will not publicly confirm or deny that it has the bomb, leaving the question permanently vague. Its leadership has promised on repeated occasions, “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East.”
But the word introduce was never defined. Does it mean “use in warfare”? Does it mean “threaten with nuclear weapons”? The word is a finely tuned cipher, containing a galaxy of possibilities. A dose of regional empathy was also involved, according to Michael Karpin. Arab countries were now handed a bulletproof excuse for not marching on Jerusalem—no country wanted to see its own capital turned to green glass—thus leaving intact the binding force that holds the Middle East together.
One thing is certain, though. The Israelis believe that “introduction” does not mean possession. The existence of the Tunnel has been called the worst-kept secret in the intelligence world. Two years after the first bomb was built, the CIA included the news in a National Intelligence Estimate and concluded that three more warheads were on the way. Any remaining doubts were shattered in 1986 when a technician named Mordechai Vanunu broke cover and gave a detailed description to the London Sunday Times, complete with illicit photographs of the six-level facility that lay behind the bricked-over elevators. Vanunu had become disenchanted with his nation’s policy toward Palestinians and, after he was laid off from Dimona, took a backpacking trip around the world, ending up in Australia, where, as he wrote to an ex-girlfriend, he enjoyed the company of the locals because “they drink a lot of beer.” He converted to Christianity while there and was eventually persuaded to go to the newspapers with his knowledge of the secret atomic bunker, in the belief that total disclosure would help bring a faster peace to the Middle East. He traveled to London to meet with the Sunday Times, where editors were skeptical and insisted on having Vanunu’s assertions checked by a team of nuclear physicists before they would publish.
While he waited for the story to appear, the thirty-year-old Vanunu met a heavy-set blonde named Cindy, and the two struck up a fast friendship. Cindy said she worked for a cosmetics company in America and she listened with awe and admiration to his life story. They went to concerts and art galleries, and then she suggested they take a weekend getaway to Rome, where her sister had a flat where they could stay. That sounded like a good idea to Vanunu. When he walked into the flat, he was tackled by two men, injected with drugs, and smuggled onto a fast boat to Tel Aviv, where he learned that his new girlfriend, Cindy, had actually been a classic “honey trap,” in the pay of the Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
His captors took him into a cell and thrust the front page of the October 5 Sunday Times at his face. It was headlined in bold type: REVEALED: THE SECRETS OF ISR AEL’S NUCLE AR ARSENAL. The paper and its team of experts had verified every detail of his spectacular story. “See the damage you have done!” they yelled. Vanunu was sentenced to eighteen years in prison for treason.
Despite overwhelming evidence of the Tunnel’s existence, Israel maintained ambiguity. The story was neither confirmed nor denied. “I hope there won’t be any more bother with this matter,” Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir told national radio after Vanunu was in custody. The arsenal was a forbidden topic, a black box, a secret wedged into the tunnel.
An inscrutable silence, it was thought, had deterred Arab neighbors from clamoring for their own bomb in the name of regional balance.
This philosophy was not perfect, though, and one shortcoming had been exposed in 1968, when it created a major diplomatic problem. After years of negotiation and compromise at the UN, all the sovereign nations of the world, from China to Togo, were given the option of signing a global treaty regarding nuclear weapons. Aside from the Pax Romana and the UN itself, this treaty was arguably the first successful effort in the history of the earth that sought to extend a covenant to all known civilization; not just military superpowers, but every tiny principality in every distant ocean.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, known as the NPT, was the essence of simplicity. The five nations with acknowledged atomic weapons—the United States, the USSR, China, Great Britain, and France7—would agree not to give away the weapons technology or the uranium. Those 180 nations who were the atomic “have-nots” would agree not to build weapons or manufacture highly enriched uranium, and to open their existing reactors for spot checks by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The inspectors would be looking for evidence that plutonium was being carried off—in inspector lingo, “diverted”—for use in a bomb. This was exactly what had been happening in the Negev for the better part
of five years.
The NPT was elegant, but it was also crude. It was the logic of schoolyard bullies, all with rocks in their fists and none wanting to be struck. To attack would invite destruction; a selfish peace would therefore be necessary. The treaty incorporated a cold military reality that had been plain to every serious policymaker since Hiroshima, and what had been neatly stated by the declaration of the Harvard and MIT scientists in 1945: that the blueprints were public and the uranium was plentiful, and international cooperation was the only thing that could prevent a border squabble from becoming an inferno. The “club of five” nuclear elite was not required to disarm and would thus be exempt from the indignity of reactor inspection. What would be the point of hiding uranium enrichment if you already have an arsenal?
A distasteful reality was therefore enshrined: Five nations on the globe would have the power evermore, and all the rest would have to take a vow of abstinence. The NPT, in the words of one analyst, was like a man with a cigarette dangling from his lips telling everyone else to stop smoking. A provision obligated the club of five to work toward “complete disarmament under strict and effective international control,” but this blandishment was so vague as to be meaningless. A bipolar world was also guaranteed through this treaty: Uncommitted countries could pick one of two nuclear umbrellas to hide underneath in crisis, that of either the United States or the USSR. Choices had never been so narrow in a world without uranium. “Given the perverse set of values mankind has inherited from its violent past,” one physicist noted, “a nation with the power of annihilation is presumably more important than one without it.”
In spite of these acknowledged hypocrisies and shortcomings, the treaty picked up fifty-nine signatures the year it was presented and, after ponderous diplomacy, would eventually be signed by almost every country on earth except Israel, for whom the treaty was a serious conundrum. Refusing to go along would be a tacit admission that Dimona indeed concealed a sophisticated plutonium factory. But signing would mean an embarrassing disarmament and the end of the hard-won nuclear program. This would deny Israel the hole card that military strategists called the Samson Option, after the muscular antihero in the biblical book of Judges who pulled down the pillars of a Philistine temple to kill his enemies (and himself) rather than face death by torture. It was a Levantine version of mutually assured destruction: If faced with another certain genocide, Israel could use the ultimate weapon to vanquish its invaders, even at massive cost to itself. The secular Armageddon foreseen in 1940s America was viewed in the hard light of realpolitik in Israel, home of the original Megiddo. “The memory that no country was prepared to help when Hitler murdered six million Jews makes Israelis doubt that any country would come to their aid if they were being pushed into the sea,” noted one analyst.
Israel ultimately refused to sign the NPT and thus remains one of only four nations outside of it (the others are North Korea, India, and Pakistan). A critical decision had been made: The Jewish state would remain the sixth member of the “nuclear club,” albeit shrouded in fog. The Dimona reactor’s megawatt capacity was eventually expanded to nearly six times its original French design. But it was also becoming starved for more uranium. The Negev mines were not producing enough, and the French, wary of international condemnation, had withdrawn their support after Charles de Gaulle secretly ended what he called “irregular dealings” with Tel Aviv.
The Israelis could hardly buy their uranium on the open market. Another source would have to be secured. This was the genesis of a fake pirate operation in the Mediterranean that would eventually be known as the Plumbat Affair.
Plans were elaborate. Agents from the Mossad set up a fictitious company based in Liberia and purchased a tramp ocean freighter they rechristened the Scheersberg A. They then enlisted a friendly mid-level official at a German petrochemical company who arranged for the purchase of $3.7 million worth of yellowcake from Union Minière. The uranium had apparently been mined from Shinkolobwe several years prior, and the Belgian company was trying to rid itself of the final inventory. A contract was arranged to have it processed by a paint company in Italy that had never before handled such a large quantity.
In November 1968, the Scheersberg A was sent to the wharves at Antwerp to pick up the uranium. Two hundred tons of it were loaded into the ship, packed into barrels stamped with the misleading legend PLUMBAT, which is a harmless lead product. The entire crew of Spanish-speaking sailors was fired and a new crew, composed of Mossad-selected workers with forged passports, took their place. The ship eased out of port at sunrise on November 17, supposedly heading for Genoa and the paint company. But approximately seven days after leaving port, in the middle of the Mediterranean somewhere east of Crete, the ship made a nighttime rendezvous with an Israeli freighter.
“As two Israeli gunboats hovered near the freighters, the barrels were transferred in total darkness,” reported Time some months later. “Except for an occasional Hebrew command, no one spoke.” The freighter bearing the yellowcake sped off eastward toward Haifa, and eventually the Tunnel.
The Scheersberg A, meanwhile, docked in Turkey eight days later with no cargo. Several pages had been ripped out of its logbook. The Italian paint company was told to cancel the $12,000 processing contract because the uranium had disappeared. No further explanation was given, and the Italians were left to assume that an act of piracy or a hijacking had occurred.
The true story might have never come out if it weren’t for an alleged act of desperation on the part of a Mossad agent named Dan Ert, who was arrested five years later in Norway on suspicion of having helped assassinate one of the Palestinian terrorists who had killed eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Confined to his cell, and apparently panicking, Ert confessed his identity as an intelligence operative and, to prove it, related the story of the secret uranium transfer from the Scheersberg A. His story gained credibility after investigators discovered that he had been listed as the president of the Biscayne Trader’s Shipping Corporation, the shadowy outfit in Liberia that owned the ship. Ert was convicted of participating in a murder; he served seven months in a Norwegian jail.
The Plumbat Affair leaked out in 1977 when a former U.S. Senate attorney named Paul Leventhal spoke about it at a disarmament conference in Austria. The stolen uranium shipment, he said later, was enough to run a reactor such as Dimona for up to a decade and could yield plutonium for up to thirty atomic weapons. He added that any country that wanted uranium could probably obtain it because “safeguards are so weak, incomplete, secretive, and slow.” The Los Angeles Times quoted an expert who characterized the midnight sea transfer not as a hijacking, but as a “laundering” of illicit yellowcake.
Israeli officials reacted at first with silence and then professed total ignorance about what happened aboard the Scheersberg A. “We deny all aspects of the story which relate to Israel,” said a spokesman, days after the news broke. The European Atomic Energy Commission pledged to tighten the rules on the sale and transfer of uranium and other sensitive materials. But no substantial changes were made. Nuclear ambiguity carried the day.
Yet Israel was not the only country that hoarded uranium in the name of staving off the apocalypse.
Pakistan was founded as a religious homeland at almost exactly the same time as Israel, and also in the dust of British retreat from Empire. Its borders were made by the slash of a pen in 1947, the handiwork of a beleaguered colonial official sent from London to separate Hindu from Muslim as quickly as possible before the British flag was lowered for good.
The nation’s name, too, is bureaucratic artifice; an acronym coined in the 1930s by university students at Cambridge. It happens to mean “pure land” in Persian, but the letters were originally supposed to represent a confederation of Muslim regions struggling for independence from their pantheistic neighbors: P is for Punjab, A for the Afghan mountains, and K for the gorgeous mountain province of Kashmir.
This last place would become the scene
of two bloody and humiliating wars with India, which added to the insult by stating its interest in building an atomic bomb in the mid-1960s. A rising political star in Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, responded to India’s threat by telling a newspaper that his nation “will eat grass or leaves—even go hungry—but we will get one of our own.” Bhutto was already famous for this kind of rhetoric, a blend of the homespun and the apocalyptic, but he had a genuine fixation on the technological edge that India had gained. For Bhutto, there was no better yardstick of progress than an atomic weapon, and so when he took over as president in 1971, it was foreordained that a nuclear program would be under way.
The stakes climbed after India test-exploded a nuclear device named Smiling Buddha in an underground shaft in 1974. This test was made—pointedly—several dozen miles from the Pakistan border, and it became a watershed moment in the lives of many Pakistanis who shared their leader’s obsession with maintaining a balance of military power with the Hindu superpower to the east.
Among those Pakistanis was a thirty-six-year-old technician named Abdul Qadeer Khan, who was then living in a rural town in Holland, a short drive from Amsterdam. He was moved to write a letter to Bhutto offering his technical services. This was no vain act of patriotism: Khan was in a genuine position to help. After earning a doctorate in metallurgical engineering in Belgium, Khan had landed a job at a subcontractor for Urenco, Europe’s only facility that enriched uranium for nuclear power plants. Though he had only a mid-level security clearance, people liked the outgoing and charming Khan, and he was permitted access to the sensitive areas of his own plant, and even Urenco’s. He could therefore offer what Pakistan most wanted: an easy path to the bomb.
Tom Zoellner Page 14
