Israel and the Bomb

With the return of Ben Gurion to power in 1955, nuclear energy became a matter of national priority. Ben Gurion gave political backing and financial support to those in the Ministry of Defense who were committed to promoting nuclear energy—Peres, Bergmann, Mardor, and the nuclear enthusiasts at Machon 4. There was also a change in the international climate concerning nuclear energy, in the wake of Eisenhower’s December 1953 Atoms-for-Peace initiative. Until then, nuclear energy in the United States, Canada, and Britain, the three major countries dealing with nuclear energy, was largely closed to other countries. The Atoms for Peace initiative made nuclear energy technology available to the rest of the world.

In Israel in 1955 policy makers and scientists agreed that the country must take advantage of the new opportunities posed by the American program to initiate a national nuclear energy project. There was no agreement, however, over what the objectives, priorities, and timetable of the project should be, and how to pursue them. The debate revolved around how ambitious the project should be, and particularly to what extent the interest in military applications should drive the effort. In 1955–56 it was not clear how far Israel could advance its nuclear ambitions. The debates took place behind closed doors, among policy makers and scientists, establishing the pattern of secrecy and opacity that would characterize the Israeli nuclear program.

At the end of 1954, while Ben Gurion was on leave in the Negev kibbutz of Sdeh Boker, Israel’s political and defense leadership was embroiled in scandals and intrigues; much of it came to be known as the Lavon Affair (see chapter 8). In early 1955 Ben Gurion was asked by the MAPAI leadership to return to his old post as minister of defense. Soon thereafter Ben Gurion determined that the time had come for Israel to launch a national nuclear energy project, with the objective of developing nuclear weapons.

Little is known on how Ben Gurion had reached this conclusion. What is known, however, is that during 1954, the year Ben Gurion was in Sdeh Boker, his close group of loyalists at the Ministry of Defense—Peres, Dayan, and Bergmann—briefed him regularly on the important issues of state, especially matters of security.¹ He received reports on the frustrations of his loyalists with Lavon’s reckless policies, including Bergmann’s anger over Lavon’s decision to dismantle the nuclear physics section of Machon 4 and sell it to the Weizmann Institute.

It appears that Ben Gurion shared Bergmann’s anger. There is evidence to suggest that, in late 1954, Ben Gurion was preoccupied with the nuclear project. On 16 December 1954, in a closed-door session with MAPAI leaders, including Prime Minister Sharett and Minister of Defense Lavon, Ben Gurion raised the issue.² He warned of the consequences of polarization at home, and cautioned that the seven Arab nations that fought Israel in its War of Independence were to form a united Arab nation, most likely under Egyptian hegemony. The more the Arabs became united, the less they would accept Israel. Ben Gurion also saw Israel itself as weakening and losing its pioneering spirit, with its electoral system allowing, even encouraging, ethnic division and instability. The mass immigration into Israel was creating national divisions, not unity. Toward the end of his address Ben Gurion said the following: “And another issue that must be given more resources by the state is the development of science. It might be that our ultimate security would rest on that. But I will not talk about it any further. This could be the last thing that may save us.”³

Ben Gurion’s subsequent expressions make clear what he had in mind. On 24 April 1955, in a special cabinet session dedicated to security briefing, Ben Gurion presented his colleagues with a bleak picture of the state of the Arab-Israeli conflict and its consequences for Israel’s long-term security. He depicted Egyptian president Nasser as Israel’s most dangerous enemy, determined to destroy Israel once the right opportunity presented itself. He focused on the increasingly negative balance of military power between Israel and its neighbors, concluding that Israel’s long-term security must be based on its own strength, not on external guarantees. According to the Sharett diaries, Ben Gurion explicitly alluded to “the future of atomic research” as one of his primary objectives.⁴

Three days later Ben Gurion publicly expressed his philosophy of self-reliance. In an Independence Day address, Ben Gurion told the country that “the future of Israel was not dependent on what the gentiles would say, but on what the Jews would do.” This attitude became the motto of the nuclear program.

The cabinet discussion was followed by a meeting at the Ministry of Defense on 5 May 1955, about the need to invest more in scientific research. Mardor, in quoting Ben Gurion, noted the latter’s elliptical, yet unmistakable, remarks in the meeting:

For the leaders of EMET these words meant an endorsement of their philosophy, and a promise of resources to implement that philosophy.⁶ In 1955 EMET began to recruit advanced students in science, mathematics, and engineering for the project. The first recruits were selected by Bergmann and Jenka Ratner, the head of Machon 3 of EMET and the future chief of the bomb project. A few of the recruits were sent for postgraduate work at the Institute of Nuclear Science and Techniques at Saclay, near Paris, and the Chatillon Nuclear Establishment, the home of France’s first nuclear reactor.⁷ This time the recruits were told more explicitly about their EMET mission. After being granted their security clearances and sworn to secrecy, the recruits were told by Ratner in unequivocal language that they were chosen for Israel’s most secret national project—a project that would result in the building of an Israeli nuclear device.⁸ Arrangements were made so that the new recruits would stay with EMET for some time after they finished their postgraduate studies. The leaders of EMET were determined not to repeat the mistakes of the past in selecting the new scientists. Unlike Racah’s selection of de Shalit’s group in 1949 on the basis of science alone, in 1955–56 Ratner and Bergmann selected people who were ready to commit themselves to the top-secret project.

The year 1955 was also a year of great international excitement over the use and spread of nuclear energy. On 8 December 1953, in a speech at the UN, President Eisenhower unveiled his Atoms for Peace program which reversed the American policy of nuclear denial and brought an end to a decade of nuclear secrecy.⁹ The speech symbolized the age of unlimited faith in nuclear energy. It manifested the expectation that nuclear energy would be the third wave of the industrial revolution, and that American technology should lead the march. The distinction between peaceful and destructive uses of atomic energy, and the belief that it was possible to promote the one and to control the other, was the ethos of this program.

Soon thereafter Eisenhower asked Congress to amend the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to allow the United States to declassify nuclear scientific information and theoretical and experimental research data, and to allow distribution of nuclear materials. Research reactors, previously prohibited for export by law, were promoted as a necessary step toward the future; techniques for uranium enrichment and plutonium separation were declassified. Atoms for Peace was successful in promoting American nuclear technology, but it was less successful in maintaining safeguards and control. The Eisenhower administration released so much information that later administrations saw fit to reclassify some of it.

Israel took full advantage of the new developments. In 1954 the United States offered Israel a small experimental reactor as part of the negotiations on the regional water issue, and both Sharett and Ben Gurion supported the IAEC recommendation that Israel should sign on to the American offer. Israel was the second nation, after Turkey, to join the Atoms for Peace initiative. According to Sharett’s diary, on 18 May 1955, the draft of the contract reached the prime minister’s office. “I called Ben Gurion and he stepped immediately into my office. We read the contract and we found no fault in it,” Sharett wrote in his diary. “It does not prohibit us from contacting other powers, nor even the use of nuclear power to be produced in our own means. On the other hand, it promises us a reactor for experiments and also research, and requires only one limitation: not to use this reactor for any other purpose.”¹⁰ Two months later, on 12 July 1955, Israel and the United States signed a general agreement for peaceful nuclear cooperation, including an agreement for the purchase of a small research nuclear reactor.¹¹ While in July 1955 Israel had nothing like a nuclear master plan, it was clear to Israeli decision makers that the agreement with the United States should not foreclose other options.

The first Geneva Conference on the Peaceful Use of Atomic Energy was convened in August 1955. The presumption underlying the conference was that, within fifty years, nuclear and solar energy would replace fossil fuels. Some twenty-five thousand delegates and observers attended the meetings, with private industry sending hundreds of its own people. Israel sent its entire nuclear elite to the Geneva conference. Bergmann was the delegation’s deputy head, and Dostrovsky, de Shalit, Racah, Cohen, Lipkin, and Pelah came as delegates, advisers, or observers.

During the Geneva conference the Israeli delegation discussed its nuclear energy plans with the American delegation. Most of these discussions were about reactors, specifically the original ideas Israeli scientists had come up with to increase the capabilities of the reactor the United States had previously offered Israel. The purpose of this special design was to use the reactor to produce small quantities of plutonium from Israel’s stock of natural uranium. Bergmann told American officials that the IAEC physicists had devised “what they thought was an original concept,” utilizing a core of enriched uranium and a blanket of natural uranium, plus heavy water as a neutron moderator and coolant.

Bergmann mentioned this point in his meeting with the chair of the AEC, Admiral Lewis Strauss. Bergmann explained that Israel wanted something more powerful than the original research reactor the United States had offered Israel, “something like a real reactor,” a reactor that would allow Israel to train engineers and chemists in working with the “new elements, such as plutonium.” Bergmann compared the reactor design concept to the pressurized-water reactor (PWR).¹² Strauss’s response, according to Bergmann’s report, was categorical: “You could not do anything that would provide you even the slightest quantities of plutonium.”¹³ In a response to Bergmann’s comment that the Israeli ideas would not violate the framework agreement—in any case the few grams of plutonium that it would produce “could not endanger the security of the United States”—Strauss said that although it was not clear yet how the safeguards system would be put together, “there would be control.” To relieve the tension that was created, writes Bergmann, Strauss asked them when Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur took place and suggested that the Israeli proposals be submitted to the AEC via the embassy by the end of September.¹⁴

Another meeting took place between Bergmann, Dostrovsky, and de Shalit, and Ambassador Morehead Patterson, President Eisenhower’s special ambassador on nuclear energy. At the outset Bergmann declared that “Israel wanted to go forward immediately towards the development of atomic power,” citing Israel’s difficulties in securing oil. Bergmann also told the Americans that Israel was producing uranium from phosphates and heavy water, “both in small quantities.”¹⁵ In this meeting, too, Bergmann discussed the Israeli ideas to upgrade the design of the reactor, comparing those ideas to the U.S. design of its Shipping-port power reactor.¹⁶ Referring to the fact that such a reactor would produce small quantities of plutonium, Bergmann asked whether the American-Israeli agreement would permit Israel to construct such a reactor, and what would be the fate of the plutonium.

As to the American response, there is some difference between the American and Israeli reports. According to the American memorandum, “Ambassador Patterson stated that he had no idea what the answer would be to these questions,” noting that “the research reactor program was intended merely to start the process of education which would ultimately lead to power.” According to Bergmann’s report, Patterson praised the Israeli initiative and expressed his opinion that Israel would have no problem with the United States on this. Patterson stressed, however, that the final decision laid with the AEC, not the president. Patterson was also said to suggest that in order to avoid difficulties the Israelis should propose initially something that would not stir objection, with the intention of adding to the proposal later. “In any case, there was no chance of effective control.”¹⁷

Bergmann’s final report (classified “top secret”) on the conference, which was circulated in two versions among governmental agencies and individuals, reveals something about the long-term hopes of the IAEC and the gap between those hopes and its present poverty. Bergmann urged the government “to make all efforts to get as much assistance as possible from the United States, in both information and material; this effort needs to be made as early as possible, for political considerations may influence the American response to our request.”¹⁸ Specifically, Bergmann proposed that Israel immediately purchase from the United States the small swimming-pool reactor, “with those improvements that our scientists propose and are accepted by the Americans,” under the Atoms for Peace program. “Such a reactor can be obtained in a relatively short time; it would allow us to educate our people.” He also recommended buying in the United States twenty tons of heavy water, “conditional on no U.S. control.” These two purchases were to be carried out immediately. In addition, he recommended accumulating the quantities of thorium and uranium that “will be needed for our future plans.” All this and more was based on the assumption “that in the future we will have to rely on ourselves.”¹⁹

An even more revealing letter, dated 28 August 1955, involving Israel’s hidden agenda and the lessons of the Geneva conference, was written by de Shalit to Mardor. The letter contains sharp criticism of the approach Bergmann proposed, providing a window to what Bergmann and Mardor had in mind, including what the “improvements that our scientists propose” were. De Shalit cautioned Mardor against imprudence in the nuclear field. It is worth citing the letter at length:

De Shalit thus opposed the idea that Israel could secretly use its Atoms for Peace reactor for extracting plutonium, taking it upon himself to balance Bergmann’s optimism and remind the leadership of the political risks and technological limits of the enterprise. From that time on, the nuclear physicists at the Weizmann Institute, under the leadership of de Shalit, would be the sharpest critics of the Bergmann-Mardor alliance.

Within weeks after the Geneva conference, the situation in Israel and the region changed in ways that influenced the future of the nuclear project. In Israel, following the general elections in late July, Ben Gurion formed the cabinet and assumed his old posts of prime minister and minister of defense. Sharett agreed to serve as his foreign minister. This was a victory for Ben Gurion’s activist defense policy. Sharett offered an alternative policy toward a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He believed that a dialogue with Nasser was possible, and that a security understanding, preferably in the form of a guarantee of Israel’s territorial integrity, should be reached with the United States. Sharett urged a policy that would limit the use by Israel of military force in order to facilitate a political solution.²¹

Ben Gurion rejected Sharett’s objectives and his choice of means. He saw Arab hostility to Israel as fundamental and enduring. Nasser’s pan-Arabic rhetoric made him Israel’s most dangerous enemy. An activist Israeli policy of military reprisals was necessary to keep Nasser in check, perhaps even leading to his fall. Only ten days after coming back to the Ministry of Defense, Ben Gurion approved a major reprisal raid against the Egyptian army in the Gaza strip.²²

Ben Gurion was also skeptical about the availability of U.S. security guarantees to Israel. In the early 1950s Ben Gurion entertained the idea of a defense pact between the United States and Israel, which would guarantee Israel’s 1949 cease-fire borders, as the best solution for Israel’s predicament.²³ When he returned to power, however, he no longer thought such a pact was feasible and stressed the reasons why both sides would avoid such a formal alliance.²⁴ The response to Israel’s security problems did not lie in diplomacy, but in an activist defense policy based on a deterrence posture Israel would develop on its own. A nuclear option would be central to this posture.

A second development was the large Czech-Egyptian arms deal, which was announced by Nasser in late September 1955. The deal would double or even triple Egypt’s military strength, especially in artillery, armor, and in the air, threatening the Egyptian-Israeli military balance.²⁵ A month later Nasser announced the closing of the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, an action Israel considered an act of war. In December 1955 Ben Gurion submitted to the cabinet a military plan to occupy and reopen the straits, but the cabinet, under Sharett’s influence, rejected it. Another Egyptian-Israeli war appeared likely.²⁶ It was calculated that the Egyptians needed eight months to deploy their new weapons, so that the Egyptian army would be capable of attacking Israel by the following summer.²⁷ Israel had to choose between waiting until Egypt was ready to fight or initiating a preventive war. Ben Gurion responded to the deteriorating situation by launching an urgent campaign to purchase military hardware abroad, and by accelerating research and production of weapons at home.

Among his initiatives, Ben Gurion ordered rush development of a cheap unconventional deterrence capability—chemical munitions—to be produced at EMET facilities. Ben Gurion considered it vital for Israel to maintain a capability “which could set up another line of defense for Israel, beyond the conventional means of the IDF, in case the enemy would use non-conventional weapons in the battlefield or against civilian population.” He ordered that this capability be made operational before war could break out. This was the “project that preceded the nuclear option.”²⁸

In late 1955 the Foreign Ministry and the Defense Ministry were competing with each other for securing sources of armaments. Sharett’s effort focused on obtaining American weapons, while Peres concentrated on French material. Peres had started advocating a French orientation in areas of armaments and military technology as early as 1953.²⁹ These early efforts yielded little, though, because Lavon did not back his efforts in France.³⁰

With Ben Gurion back in power, especially after the Czech-Egyptian arms deal in September, the dealings with France were given a boost. Within months France became Israel’s primary arms supplier, with major deals for jet fighters, tanks, and other military equipment.³¹ By the spring of 1956 Peres reached a comprehensive security understanding with the government of Guy Mollet. The details of that understanding were formalized in a secret conference in Vermars on 22 June 1956 between the senior military representatives of the two countries.³²

The circumstances contributing to the development of the relationship were both geopolitical and domestic. By 1955–56 the situation in France’s North African colonies was deteriorating, and the French military establishment viewed Nasser as the force behind the Algerian rebellion, which was becoming uncontrollable.³³ A militarily strong Israel, capable of threatening Nasser, was now in France’s interest.

The warming of the French-Israeli relationship after September 1955 was not only the result of geopolitics, but was also driven by domestic, economic, and even personal forces. With the help of the French ambassador in Israel, Pierre Gilbert, Peres formed a pro-Israeli coalition combining pro-Jewish and socialist sentiments with nationalistic interests in the expansion of the French aerospace and nuclear industries. Peres also took advantage of the structural weaknesses of the Fourth Republic. Recognizing the fragmentation of France’s policy-making organs, Peres developed a close relationship with the French defense and interior (intelligence) ministers, bypassing the pro-Arab Quai d’Orsay bureaucracy.³⁴ As Sylvia Crosbie puts it:

Peres arranged to obtain French weapons through unconventional channels, using these channels to explore whether France would assist Israel in pursuing nuclear weapons. That France itself was still undecided about the acquisition of its own nuclear weapons, and that the pronuclear camp advanced its cause stealthily and incrementally, made it easier for Peres to advance Israel’s nuclear objective. Defense Minister Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, a supporter of French nuclear weapons, understood Peres’s vision just as he understood the need to keep the two countries’ nuclear plans opaque.

During the year following the Geneva conference, the IAEC debated ideas and proposals about how to initiate a national nuclear energy project. Until the early summer of 1956 the focus of those debates was the nuclear assistance that the United States had offered Israel. There was a national consensus that Israel should take advantage of the 1955 bilateral nuclear cooperation agreement and build a reactor with American technological and financial assistance, but it was less clear what type of reactor it should be and, even more fundamentally, what kind of a national program Israel should pursue. There were two reasons for the lack of clarity: (1) uncertainty as to the scope and nature of assistance that the United States would offer, for example, what kind of reactor the United States would be willing to help Israel construct under the conditions of the 1955 bilateral agreement, which firm should be the project’s contractor, the terms of the financial assistance from the U.S. government, and issues concerning the fuel (lease or purchase); and (2) fundamental disagreements as to what should be the appropriate scope and objectives of the Israeli project at this initial stage.

Given those uncertainties and debates, a large IAEC delegation—headed by Bergmann and including Dostrovsky, de Shalit, Pelah, and Lipkin—was sent in the spring of 1956 to the United States and Canada for an educational tour. The objective was to visit nuclear energy research centers (national laboratories, universities, and industry) to garner advice on which reactors were available and the firms that could supply them. On 11 April Bergmann and his team paid a visit to the AEC headquarters to discuss Israeli plans. Bergmann informed his hosts that Israel was planning to construct a 10-MW research reactor fueled by natural uranium and moderated by heavy water (the uranium to be produced in Israel itself). Bergmann explained the rationale for this kind of reactor by saying that “Israel enjoyed a fairly advanced technological position in the atomic field” and decided, therefore, to “skip over the experimental phase of operating a swimming pool type” of research reactor. He also stated that the specifications of the reactor had already been given to a number of American firms and that the IAEC expected to receive bids in a few weeks. Bergmann indicated that Israel would like to obtain from the AEC “research quantities” of enriched uranium and the heavy water required for the reactor as part of the agreement, and asked whether such requests would pose any particular difficulties. The Americans replied that, in principle, a purchase of heavy water posed no special problems as long as it was used for peaceful purposes. It was agreed that Israel would submit an official request for heavy water as well as the specifications of the reactor necessary to qualify for American financial assistance at a later date, once a formal decision had been made.³⁶

In reality, however, no immediate decision was made. The visit only intensified the internal debate in the IAEA. Once again, the primary antagonists were Bergmann and de Shalit. Bergmann advocated an ambitious dual-purpose nuclear energy program, that is, one with both peaceful and military applications. In a memorandum to Peres, written in July 1956, Bergmann urged that Israel build two reactors at the same time—a small research reactor near the Weizmann Institute in Rehovot or in Nachal Soreq, and a larger one in the Negev, as well as explore other possibilities. Bergmann concluded: “If we pursue all these paths, we may be confident that some of them at least will lead to our goal.”³⁷ Even without foreign assistance, Israel should go ahead and build a nuclear reactor on its own.³⁸

De Shalit (as well as Lipkin) considered Bergmann’s ideas “dangerous and fantastic.”³⁹ Instead, de Shalit advocated a modest program directed at research and training by way of building a small swimming pool research reactor. De Shalit opposed Bergmann’s idea of the 10-MW natural uranium, heavy-water reactor for technological-scientific, financial, and—not the least—political reasons. It appears that de Shalit thought that Bergmann’s ideas would compromise Israel’s “peaceful use” pledge under the 1955 agreement. As to Bergmann’s interest to start a nuclear power program immediately, De Shalit did not think that Israel was ready for that. Israel did not have adequate manpower to start such a program. All the major decisions regarding power and military applications should be postponed.

This was the state of affairs in the spring of 1956. Israel seemed unable to make up its mind what type of nuclear program it should pursue. Ben Gurion and Peres sympathized with Bergmann’s visionary ideas, but they also carefully considered de Shalit’s view that Bergmann’s grand vision was ungrounded in reality and therefore dangerous. Peres recognized that Bergmann’s concept was unfeasible the way he conceived it, but he looked for other ways to make it politically and technologically feasible. Peres focused his efforts on France, not the United States, but for the time being, in mid-1956, the IAEC pursued its plans without making a decision.

In early summer the IAEC submitted the information needed for its request for a $350,000 American grant toward a small, pool-type research reactor.⁴⁰ At the same time (17 July 1956), however, Bergmann wrote to the AEC chairman, Lewis Strauss, that Israel was interested in purchasing from the AEC 10 tons of heavy water to use in a 10-MW natural uranium, heavy-water reactor it was about to build. The Americans interpreted Bergmann’s letter to imply that the Israelis were contemplating “the construction of a second reactor of a type that will not permit them to obtain U.S. nuclear fuel under the existing research agreement.”⁴¹

Ironically the author of this memo had no idea how this assessment was accurate in September 1956, but for reasons he could not be aware of. By the summer of 1956 Shimon Peres’s French connection bore fruit: the geopolitical situation created a unique window of opportunity to bypass the need to choose between Bergmann’s and de Shalit’s options. As noted earlier, efforts to acquire French nuclear assistance began in the late 1940s, but nobody could predict, even by late 1955, that France would be ready to supply Israel with a comprehensive nuclear package, including both a large reactor that could produce significant quantities of plutonium and the technology to separate it from the irradiated reactor fuel, a so-called reprocessing plant.

By early 1956, as French-Israeli military relations intensified, Peres became convinced that France could be the primary source of nuclear assistance. He looked for the political opening that would allow the extension of the Franco-Israeli alliance to the nuclear field. If this could happen, then the whole debate between Bergmann and de Shalit would be rendered irrelevant. Peres agreed with de Shalit that Bergmann’s optimism was unwarranted, but he, like Bergmann, was not ready to postpone the big project. With this in mind, Peres focused much of his activities in Paris from early 1956 in developing a strategy to persuade France to be Israel’s foreign nuclear supplier, that is, to provide Israel with the kind of assistance that would allow it to initiate a nuclear program aimed ultimately at producing nuclear explosives.

In parallel with the negotiations with the United States, Peres and Bergmann approached their colleagues at the French Ministry of Defense and the CEA about Israel’s interest in buying a nuclear reactor from France as part of a closer French-Israeli nuclear relationship. At the time France was debating its own nuclear future, both in the area of civil power and military applications. The small and young French nuclear industry was interested in finding a major international client that would allow France to establish its credentials as a nuclear player. On the other side of the Atlantic, both the United States and Canada had already been engaged in major deals of exporting nuclear know-how, technology, and material to new nations, such as India.⁴²

Yet, the French hesitated.⁴³ By spring, Peres concluded that this hesitation might be overcome if Israel offered them something of value in return, for example, intelligence cooperation concerning the relations between Egypt and the Algerian rebels.⁴⁴ Ben Gurion therefore authorized the creation of a special intelligence relationship between Agaf Modi’in (AMAN, Israeli military intelligence) and its French counterpart, suggesting that a tacit exchange of intelligence for nuclear help, among other things, could be fashioned.⁴⁵ Whether the intelligence cooperation would have been enough to bring about French nuclear assistance to Israel was never tested, since the situation changed almost overnight.

On 26 July 1956 Nasser announced the nationalization of the Suez Canal.⁴⁶ The Egyptian challenge to the Mollet government provided Peres the opportunity to push the French-Israeli alliance a step further. The opportunity presented itself the next day, when French defense minister Bourges-Maunoury asked Peres for an urgent meeting. According to Peres, Bourges-Maunoury wasted little time in asking how long it would take the IDF to cross the Sinai Peninsula and reach the canal. When Peres replied that, in his assessment, it could be done in less than two weeks, Bourges-Maunoury then asked if Israel would be prepared to participate in a tripartite military operation, in which Israel’s specific role would be to cross the Sinai. Peres responded: “Under certain circumstances I assume that we would be so prepared.” To the admonition of an aide, who told Peres that he—Peres—had no authority to promise Israel’s participation and that he might be punished, Peres responded that he would “rather risk his neck than risk missing a unique opportunity like this.”⁴⁷ Peres’s biographer writes that Peres readily replied in the affirmative because he calculated that this could be the opportunity that would give Israel the reactor.⁴⁸

The results came quickly. In August Shalheveth Freier, the first Israeli science liaison associated with the evolving nuclear project, arrived in Paris,⁴⁹ and on 17 September 1956 (or 21 September, according to Peres’s biographer) the CEA and the IAEC reached an agreement in principle on the sale to Israel of a “small” research reactor, one like the EL-3 reactor at Saclay.⁵⁰ The physicist Bertrand Goldschmidt, who was in charge of external relations at the CEA and who attended that meeting, recalled that Peres and Bergmann “explained to us that they wanted our help to create … something like ‘nuclear capacity’.”⁵¹ The agreement still needed political approval, but there is little doubt that the French understood what the deal was about. For the French commissariat, selling the reactor to Israel meant the export of French nuclear technology, a way to advertise France’s young nuclear industry and to establish its credentials in the field.⁵²

In his 1995 Memoirs Peres acknowledged that the nuclear issue was discussed briefly at the end of the secret Sèvres conference (22–24 October), when the British-French-Israeli collaboration was cemented. According to Peres, “Before the final signing, I asked Ben Gurion for a brief adjournment, during which I met Mollet and Bourges-Maunoury alone. It was here that I finalized with these two leaders an agreement for the building of a nuclear reactor at Dimona, in southern Israel, and the supply of natural uranium to fuel it.”⁵³

It was not the case that the nuclear reactor was the price for Israel’s involvement in the French operation in the Suez. Although the nuclear issue was an important element in the Israeli calculation for cooperation with the French in the Suez campaign—and that cooperation played a role in facilitating the September reactor deal—it was not a simple bargain. It was an implicit incentive for both nations, not a condition.⁵⁴ This point is seen in the record of the Sèvres conference, in which Ben Gurion negotiated the terms of the Israeli participation in the Suez campaign. The nuclear issue was not raised during the substantive negotiations about the Israeli role. It was only after the understandings of the Sèvres conference were reached that Peres briefly mentioned the reactor deal, which had already been concluded at the technical level, and thanked the French.⁵⁵ Had Ben Gurion been unsatisfied with the political or military terms of the Israeli participation in the Suez operation, the nuclear deal, in itself, would have been insufficient to persuade him to allow Israel to participate in the French-inspired operation.⁵⁶

The nuclear reactor deal that Peres initiated with the CEA in September, and which was affirmed at Sèvres, was not the Dimona reactor as we know it. The agreement was about a smaller reactor. Pierre Péan makes it clear that the September agreement did not cover a Dimona-type reactor. Rather, he states that the “small” reactor was located at Rishon Le-Zion, near the Weizmann Institute, and that early construction work had already begun at that site.⁵⁷ In the discussions preceding the Suez campaign, “the plutonium-producing nature of the reactor” was not emphasized, and certainly the sale did not include a plutonium separation plant.⁵⁸

As the Suez crisis deepened, the original plan changed. On 6 November the Soviets issued an ultimatum to the three states involved in the campaign to stop the operation, but their most dire threat was directed at Israel, accusing it of “criminally and irresponsibly playing with the fate of its own people … which puts in jeopardy the very existence of Israel as a State.”⁵⁹ In a separate letter to Ben Gurion, Prime Minister Nikolai Bulganin warned that the Soviets were able to attack Israel with missiles. Eisenhower, who had just been elected to a second term, also demanded an immediate cease-fire and withdrawal. By the early morning hours of 8 November Ben Gurion had secretly sent Shimon Peres and Golda Meir to Paris, to “find out what the French stand would be in the event of specific Soviet intervention.”⁶⁰ He wanted to know what France could do for Israel before making a decision on withdrawal from the Sinai.⁶¹

French foreign minister Christian Pineau, Defense Minister Maurice Bourges-Maunoury, and Maunoury’s close aide, Abel Thomas, could offer no words of encouragement. They pledged that France would stand at Israel’s side, but it was evident that France had nothing concrete to offer Israel in the face of the Soviet nuclear threat. Pineau told the Israelis that he took the Soviet threats very seriously, and urged Israel to comply with the ultimatum.⁶²

Israeli sources are silent on what happened at this point, but according to Péan, who cites French sources, it was in these talks that the idea of substantial French nuclear assistance to Israel was conceived.⁶³ According to Thomas, Peres raised the issue of French nuclear assistance to Israel as a security guarantee if Israel withdrew from the Sinai. This timely nuclear assistance would constitute the ultimate guarantee of Israel’s existence. Péan quotes Peres: “I don’t trust the guarantees of others…. What would you think if we prepared our own retaliation force?”⁶⁴ Bourges-Maunoury and Thomas, two advocates of French nuclear weapons, responded positively. Now they had to convince the high commissioner of the CEA, Francis Perrin, and Guy Mollet, who had not approved the French nuclear weapons program before Suez, to support the nuclear ambitions of both countries. With the Suez crisis as the backdrop, and a pledge in hand, Peres began to put together the Dimona package.