Book Review - The Samson Option - New York Times

[johnkarls]

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https://www.nytimes.com/1991/11/17/book ... ow-it.html


What Do They Have, and When Did We Know It?

Nov. 17, 1991

By Lawrence Freedman - an Emeritus Professor of War Studies at King's College London, Sir Lawrence David Freedman, KCMG, CBE, PC, FBA, is a British academic, historian and author specializing in foreign policy, international relations and strategy. He has been described as the "dean of British strategic studies" and was a member of the Iraq Inquiry, a U.K. governmental inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War.


THE existence of the Israeli "bomb" is no news. Inspired leaks, incautious remarks and informed speculation about Israel's possession of nuclear weapons were elevated long ago to much more than a mere rumor. That it is not yet a declared reality reflects a widespread desire to avoid the subject. Should Israel's nuclear status have been made official, the United States would have needed to square it with a proclaimed commitment to nuclear nonproliferation, the Arabs would be obliged to acknowledge a fundamental strategic inferiority and, in the days when it was capable of such things, the Soviet Union would have been pressured to provide nuclear guarantees to its Arab allies.

For its part, Israel can enjoy the deterrence benefits of a nuclear capability without the problems that would be raised by going public. "We will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East," official Israeli spokesmen have insisted repeatedly, occasionally adding that they would not be the second either.

The capability has been a working assumption of international affairs through a trickle of revelations. The Dimona facility in the Negev, where the nuclear material has been fabricated and turned into warheads, has been known about for three decades, and so has Israel's furtive alliance with France, which was forged in the 1950's and which led to a sharing of nuclear secrets and know-how. One of the few mysteries surrounding the capability -- whether or not there was a chemical reprocessing plant for plutonium -- was cleared up by a disgruntled former worker at the plant, Mordecai Vanunu, in 1986, in some illustrated disclosures in The Sunday Times of London.

For a talented investigative journalist like Seymour M. Hersh, the story of the Israeli bomb must have appeared as a ripening plum just waiting to be picked. With "The Samson Option," he seizes his opportunity, and manages in a readable and fascinating account to convey a keen sense of the dynamic propelling Israel's nuclear program, as well as the reluctance of the United States to arrest this dynamic. He provides compelling portraits of key figures in the drama, such as the scientist Ernst Bergmann, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who appears as the father of the Israeli bomb, and Walworth Barbour, the United States Ambassador to Israel under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, who, Mr. Hersh says, went out of his way to deflect pressure on the Israelis from his own country.

Mr. Hersh describes the resultant nuclear arsenal as one that exceeds previous estimates in both numbers and composition -- with hundreds rather than tens of warheads, including artillery shells and mines, directed against Soviet targets as much as Arab. Mr. Hersh also maintains that Israel's nuclear forces have been put on alert three times: twice during the 1973 war and once during the recent gulf war.

It is hard to avoid the impression that at times Mr. Hersh's Israeli sources have embellished their tales. His claim that nuclear mines have been planted on the Golan Heights, for example, appears as an aside provided by one of his more doubtful sources, with no discussion of the practicalities of such a deployment. If kept on the border, the mines would need to be used at the start of hostilities, although this would mean "going nuclear" while there was still hope of successful conventional resistance. If they were overrun without being detonated, they would be a gift to the enemy.

Mr. Hersh also makes great play with a supposed blackmail of the United States by Israel. He says that Israel threatened to launch a nuclear attack during the darkest days of the 1973 war, when invading Arab forces seemed on the verge of overwhelming Israel's conventional defenses, if the United States did not expedite its airlift of military supplies. An Israeli nuclear alert probably did take place as Mr. Hersh describes, and it seems to have had a salutary effect on Arab calculations, at least in subsequent years. It is also quite possible that Henry Kissinger, in his role as Secretary of State, drew attention to the alert when later explaining American actions to Arab leaders. But it is highly unlikely that the alert made much actual difference to American policy. Mr. Kissinger's strategy, Mr. Hersh says, had been to let Israel "bleed" to soften it up for postwar diplomacy. It was never his intention that Israel should be defeated, and once matters started to become desperate the resupply tap was quickly turned on. Knowledge of an Israeli nuclear alert did little more than add to the drama -- as did Washington's own nuclear alert toward the end of the war.

The real strength of Mr. Hersh's book lies in its discussion of American attitudes. If he has a central question it is this: Why did the United States, with its commitment to nuclear nonproliferation and its intelligence capabilities, not blow the whistle on the Israeli bomb and take active steps to abort it?

Inevitably the answer to this question takes him into the delicate matter of the role of the Jewish community in American policy making. Mr. Hersh addresses directly the issue of dual loyalty, discussing not only such obvious figures as Jonathan Pollard, the American Jew who spied for Israel, but also Lewis L. Strauss, the former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission and not one to parade his Jewishness, holding back embarrassing information. There is also the matter of "Jewish money" buying influence, with the Democratic Party fund raiser Abraham Feinberg figuring prominently.

As Mr. Hersh also makes clear, however, the issue is far more complex than simply the impact of a wealthy and well-positioned minority lobbying on behalf of a foreign government. In December 1968, for example, after the Republicans had won the Presidential election and campaign funds were no longer a factor, Lyndon B. Johnson backed away from making Israel sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty before allowing it to purchase F-4 jet fighters, which were capable of carrying nuclear weapons. Mr. Hersh observes that the only explanation is that this was a "farewell gift" to the Israeli people and Johnson's Jewish friends.

But Johnson's "gift" reflects a greater equivocation -- evident elsewhere in American policy where the long-term promotion of some universal value, such as human rights, has to be put against the short-term consequences of imposing that value on a special friend. The reasons that drove Israel to acquire nuclear weapons are widely understood in the West, especially the determination never again to allow Jews to be the victims of a Holocaust, whether in a Nazi-like incremental mass destruction or through an instantaneous nuclear cataclysm.

ISRAEL has little reason to trust others. The 1956 Suez debacle convinced Israel and France together of the fickleness of erstwhile allies, but then France itself reinforced the lesson for Israel when President Charles de Gaulle ordered a decisive tilt toward the Arab cause following the 1967 war. Even the close support of the United States has been qualified by American interests in the Arab world. It may be, as Mr. Hersh suggests, that David Ben-Gurion, who led Israel for most of its first 15 years of statehood, saw the creation of a nuclear option as a means of extracting a nuclear guarantee from the United States. But there is little doubt that Israel's real preference was for Washington to turn a blind eye and allow it to exercise this option.

Many in Washington and elsewhere have accepted that, given Israel's predicament, a policy of nuclear deterrence makes sense. The nuclear arsenal may have an important role to play in persuading Arab leaders to come to terms with the Israeli state. On the other hand, it is of no value whatsoever in the face of the Palestinian unrest in the occupied territories. Nuclear weapons may help deter a direct invasion, but they cannot put down an insurrection.

THE experience of the gulf war has left open the question of whether a nuclear threat can deter nonnuclear threats. Mr. Hersh argues -- without convincing evidence -- that Israel's nuclear arsenal was put on alert at the time of Iraq's Scud attacks on Israeli civilian targets. But the knowledge of an Israeli capability by itself may have deterred Saddam Hussein from fitting chemical weapons on the missiles, as may have independent American warnings of dire consequences (or the technical difficulties of chemically arming the Scuds). Whatever the reason, the Scud episode did not produce the classic "stand alone" scenario upon which Israel's drive for nuclear status has been based, but something much more ambiguous, with Israel holding back while the United States, with its allies, searched for the Scuds and provided Israel with its Patriot anti-missile defenses.

The gulf war has also encouraged uncomfortable comparisons. There are eerie similarities between Iraq's and Israel's nuclear policies, notably their dependence upon elaborate deception. A major difference is that Israel got away with it long enough to emerge with an effective capability whereas Iraq got caught.

Like other journalists, Mr. Hersh is more skilled at bringing an issue into the open than exploring its full implications, and he puts a higher premium on revelation than relevance. Unlike many other journalists, he is generally scrupulous when it comes to displaying his sources. Where he falls short here tends to be on the most recent Israeli policy, and on some of the incidental details.

One of his more curious lapses is with the Bible. Mr. Hersh quite rightly notes that the story of Samson provides a much better analogy for the nuclear option than the more-quoted "Masada complex," based on the choice of Jewish Zealots in A.D. 73 to commit mass suicide rather than be captured by the Romans. Samson's suicide brought down the temple of Dagon and so he killed, as the Bible chillingly remarks, more Philistines at his death than he had done during his life. But if Mr. Hersh had checked Judges 16 he would have found that -- contrary to his assertion that Samson was originally taken "after a bloody fight" -- the Jewish hero was captured without much trouble. He had foolishly admitted to his mistress, Delilah, a Philistine agent, that his hair was the source of his strength, prompting her to have it cut off while he slept. Rereading the story reminds one of how cock-sure Samson had become in his reliance upon his unusual strength. In Samson's capture, therefore, there may be as much of a moral as in the act that brought down his enemies and himself.ONCE IT WAS UNTHINKABLE

In September 1988, Israel launched its first satellite into orbit, bringing it a huge step closer to intercontinental missiles and a satellite intelligence capability -- no more Jonathan Pollards would be needed to steal America's secrets. Scientists . . . concluded that the rocket booster that launched the Israeli satellite produced enough thrust to deliver a small nuclear warhead to a target more than six thousand miles away. Israeli physicists are still at the cutting edge in weapons technology and involved, as are their American and Soviet counterparts, in intensive research into nuclear bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydro dynamics, and radiation transport -- the next generation of weaponry.

None of this has ever been discussed in the open in Israel, or in the Knesset. Meanwhile, Israeli field commanders have accepted nuclear artillery shells and land mines as battlefield necessities: another means to an end. The basic target of Israel's nuclear arsenal has been and will continue to be its Arab neighbors. Should war break out in the Middle East again and should the Syrians and the Egyptians break through again as they did in 1973, or should any Arab nation fire missiles again at Israel, as Iraq did, a nuclear escalation, once unthinkable except as a last resort, would now be a strong probability.