Israel and the Bomb

Israel made its first decisions on the nuclear-weapons option in 1957–58. The decisions were met with doubts and opposition, but there was no national debate on the issue. Even the few who were aware of Ben Gurion’s decisions and understood their meaning—Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Finance Minister Levi Eshkol, Commerce Minister Pinhas Sapir, Mossad chief Isser Harel, and others—were inhibited from stirring up a debate on whether Israel should take the road Ben Gurion had chosen. Their reservations stemmed from financial, political, and technological reasons, but under the secrecy and opacity Ben Gurion had created, they were reluctant to force Ben Gurion into an open debate in which he would have to reveal his objectives. They were dissenting according to the rules Ben Gurion had set, which they were unwilling to question and be blamed for putting the project at risk.

Only in the early 1960s, after the news about Dimona became public, did Israel witness a semblance of a debate over the nuclear question. It was the only time in Israel’s history that an intellectual and political effort was exerted to grapple with the nation’s nuclear choices. The debate, which was hidden from the public and conducted in language that few understood, stemmed from Israel’s need to make new decisions.

Ben Gurion’s decisions in 1962–63 on the nuclear issue were shaped not only in response to Kennedy’s pressure but also to the hidden debate in Israel. Consequently, Ben Gurion decided not to restructure the IDF and its military doctrine so as to base it on nuclear weapons. Rather, he would continue to develop a nuclear option without changing the IDF doctrine and basic organization. The decision was critical to the formation of Israel’s posture of nuclear opacity. It was Israel’s response to its nuclear problem—a response enabling Israel to have it both ways.

In the late 1950s Ben Gurion’s authority within MAPAI and the cabinet was unchallenged, and the Dimona project was ranked above all his other projects. His critics recognized that the Dimona project was the old statesman’s boldest gamble, and their criticism, in any event, was not of the idea itself but of its feasibility and the people who ran it. The reservations within MAPAI were therefore muted.¹

The Eisenhower administration’s disclosures on Dimona, and its demand for information about the purpose of the project, came at an unfortunate political time for Ben Gurion. In late December 1960 Ben Gurion confronted two challenges—a domestic crisis in his cabinet and party involving the Lavon Affair, and a confrontation with the United States over Dimona. The two issues were unrelated, but their political timing and outcomes reinforced each other. Ben Gurion was a weakened leader, and his domestic political weakness shaped his reactions to the American pressure.

The Lavon Affair was the result of a failed covert operation against U.S. and British installations in Egypt in July 1954. Pinhas Lavon, who had replaced Ben Gurion in late 1953 as minister of defense, blamed the failed operation on Colonel Benjamin Gibly, then head of military intelligence, who, according to Lavon, had initiated the operations without Lavon’s knowledge or approval. Lavon was forced to resign as minister of defense in February 1955, and became head of the powerful Histadrut, the labor union federation. In the second half of 1960, as new evidence about Gibly’s falsification of documents relevant to the 1954 operation came to light, Lavon demanded exoneration from Ben Gurion. Ben Gurion refused, saying that since he never accused Lavon of initiating the 1954 operations, he was not in a position to exonerate him. He suggested that Lavon take his case to court, but Lavon took it instead to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. Lavon’s testimony before the committee was conducted behind closed doors, but it was leaked to the press. Lavon used his testimony not only to tell his version of what happened in 1954 but also to level broad accusations against the IDF and the Ministry of Defense, and specifically at Peres and Dayan, Ben Gurion’s followers. Lavon, in effect, blamed Peres and Dayan for framing him in order to serve their own political ambitions. As the confrontation between Lavon and Ben Gurion—dubbed the Lavon Affair—became public, it became increasingly evident that the press overwhelmingly sided with Lavon.

Ben Gurion responded to Lavon’s accusations, claiming they were all slanders and falsehoods that undermined public confidence in the Israeli army and civilian control of the military. Ben Gurion was the founder of the defense establishment and had personally promoted Peres and Dayan to their powerful positions. Attacks on the IDF and the Defense Ministry, and on Peres and Dayan, were attacks on him.

In an effort to contain the dispute between the two leaders and prevent further damage to the government and the party, Finance Minister Eshkol arranged for the creation of a committee of seven cabinet members, under the chairmanship of Justice Minister Pinhas Rosen, to look into the Lavon Affair and recommend a course of action to the cabinet. Ben Gurion abstained from voting on Eshkol’s motion in the cabinet, even though he had objected earlier to a ministerial committee investigating the affair. The committee debated the case during much of November and December, and, on 21 December, announced its verdict: it exonerated Lavon from any responsibility for the failed operation in July 1954.

The committee’s conclusions were submitted to Ben Gurion on 23 December, and two days later they were submitted to the cabinet, which endorsed them. Ben Gurion, who had opposed (though passively) the creation of the committee from the beginning, was furious. He told the cabinet that the committee’s procedures were “mistaken and misleading,” and that they “led to unfairness, half truths and miscarriage of justice.” He refused to accept its findings, insisting that only a judicial inquiry should be looking into the matter. Before leaving the cabinet session, he threatened to resign. Golda Meir then threatened to resign if Ben Gurion pursued the case further, and other MAPAI cabinet ministers indicated that they might follow. The confrontation was damaging the country and the party, and it had to be stopped. Ben Gurion, representing the minority, disagreed.²

In late December 1960 Ben Gurion’s leadership was at its lowest point. As the Lavon Affair unraveled, Ben Gurion appeared passive, indecisive, and detached. He allowed other politicians, such as Eshkol and Rosen, to make important decisions against his will. His moral and political authority were evaporating, and the MAPAI leadership was more divided than ever before. The Lavon Affair plunged MAPAI into a generational power struggle between the supporters of Ben Gurion (mostly from the younger generation of MAPAI leaders) and those of Lavon (mostly the Old Guard). The struggle was about more than the exoneration of Lavon; it was about the leadership of Israel.

The party elders who rallied behind Lavon’s call for justice also wanted to block Ben Gurion’s two protégés, Peres and Dayan, whom Ben Gurion had groomed for national leadership when he retired. The opposition of the MAPAI Old Guard to Peres and Dayan went beyond personality differences and competition for leadership and power; it was about the ethos of Israel as a Zionist-Jewish state. The old leadership feared that the pragmatic, can-do style (bitsuism in Hebrew) of Peres and Dayan, combined with Ben Gurion’s efforts to change Israel’s electoral system from proportional to regional-districts representation, would weaken the system of checks and balances in the Israeli political system. “In their eyes,” writes Shabtai Teveth, “the military and the defense establishment had proved themselves unworthy of public trust, revealing an uninhibited, unrestrained lust for power, a lust that would stop at nothing, not even the use of lies and deceit to remove a minister who stood in their way.”³

The discovery in 1960 that Colonel Benjamin Gibly, the commander of military intelligence in 1954, forged documents relating to the initiation of the 1954 “sad mishap” to make it appear that Pinhas Lavon, who was minister of defense in 1954, gave him—Gibly—the go-ahead order to launch the operation, was taken as evidence of the ill-directed regime which developed in the defense establishment under Peres and Dayan. Peres especially was an anathema to the old leaders who feared his raw ambition and what they regarded as opportunistic, manipulative tendencies.

The Dimona project played an important, if implicit, role in this drama. Everybody knew that Peres was the man behind the secret Dimona project. For some it was evidence of Peres’s creativity and energy, enhancing his claim to a leadership position; for others it suggested irresponsible adventurism. Peres was accused of creating a state within a state that operated without accountability and supervision outside the normal governmental channels. For critics, the Dimona project epitomized all the ills that surfaced during the Lavon Affair, particularly the danger of a few individuals, acting under the protection of national security, making important decisions on their own.

This was the domestic background against which Ben Gurion worked to protect the Dimona project from the Eisenhower administration’s pressure. On 8 December Secretary of State Herter summoned Ambassador Harman to present him with the U.S. findings on Dimona, and requested an explanation. Ben Gurion was forced to make a decision he had wished to postpone for as long as possible: how to present the Dimona project to the United States, and how much of the truth to tell. As the Ben Gurion government continued to vacillate, the United States went ahead on 18 December and made Dimona public. Ben Gurion could wait no longer, and on 21 December he gave his first and last public statement on the subject: Dimona was being built for peaceful purposes.

There are no Israeli documents available to shed light on the decision-making process that led Ben Gurion to adopt that declaratory stance. The pages in Ben Gurion’s diary covering the period are missing; the relevant documents in the files of the Foreign Ministry Record Groups at the Israeli State Archives are not available. It is thus difficult to say to what extent Ben Gurion’s weakness at home shaped his reply to Eisenhower. It is evident, however, that the timing of his response was slow and defensive—it took three days from the time Dimona became public until Ben Gurion made his statement in the Knesset. The contents of his public response also shows a defensive stance.

By stating that Dimona was being built for peaceful purposes, Ben Gurion must have known that he had created a problem for the future. Such a claim might invite demands to place Dimona under safeguards in order to verify its veracity. It would also make it more difficult for Israel to talk about Dimona in security terms at a later point, depriving Israel of the opportunity to make Dimona an issue relevant to military deterrence in the future. If Ben Gurion wanted Israel to acquire nuclear weapons in order to strengthen Israeli deterrence, why, then, did he take such a defensive stance that left him little room for a future weapons option?

A combination of external and domestic considerations may provide an explanation. Ben Gurion’s first priority was to complete the physical infrastructure needed for the project without interruption. Until the infrastructure was in place, a confrontation over the project, either with foreign powers or critics at home, had to be avoided at all costs. It seems reasonable that, for this reason, he approved the “peaceful purposes” formula that Peres had negotiated in Paris a few months earlier—over the objections of Meir, Eshkol, Sapir, Zalman Aranne, and Harel—in return for a continuation of French involvement in the project.⁴ In December Ben Gurion decided to make public the peaceful-purposes stand. He was hoping that this would be the least controversial position abroad and at home.

Ben Gurion’s domestic difficulties appear to have made things more difficult for him on the nuclear issue as well. That he concealed the truth about the Dimona project from his cabinet, and therefore could not build a consensus behind his nuclear program even among his own party’s senior ministers, made the nuclear project vulnerable to external pressure. A weakened Ben Gurion at home was not in a position to stand up to the United States.

Ben Gurion had hoped that his public statement of 21 December and the private message Harman conveyed would reassure the United States. This did not happen. The U.S. government cooled its public rhetoric regarding Dimona, but continued to push for verifiable reassurances of Israel’s commitment. It is here that the Lavon Affair and Dimona became intertwined.

As noted, Ben Gurion received the conclusions of the committee of seven on 23 December, which were approved by the cabinet on 25 December, prompting him to threaten his resignation. Simultaneously the American pressure continued to mount, and Ben Gurion, fearing that his resignation would send the wrong signal on Dimona, decided to remain in office (though officially on leave).⁵ Subsequently, on 31 January, Ben Gurion did resign over the ministerial committee’s exoneration of Lavon. In explaining the reasons for the delay in implementing his resignation, he pointed to “a certain serious matter,” a coded reference to Dimona.⁶

Ben Gurion’s resignation and the ensuing crisis helped him postpone the American pressure for a visit by about four months. According to Ben Gurion’s biographer, there were hints that the MAPAI ministers who led the opposition to Ben Gurion were also ready to surrender to American pressure, which would have meant the abandonment of the Dimona project.⁷ This was probably true of Sapir and Education Minister Zalman Aranne, but not of Golda Meir. On the contrary, Meir had questioned from the start Ben Gurion’s and Peres’s policy of concealing Dimona from the United States, and then presenting it as having only a civilian purpose. She wanted to tell the Americans that Dimona promised a nuclear-weapons option for Israel, believing that honesty with the United States was important in light of Israel’s request for American security guarantees.⁸

Although Ben Gurion resigned in January 1961, he did not leave office; Dimona was still incomplete, Peres reminded him in a letter in which he urged him to stay on.⁹ In this manner Ben Gurion was persuaded that the moment had not yet come to leave. In time, Ben Gurion won the showdown with Lavon, who was expelled from the party and removed from his post as secretary-general of Histadrut. Ben Gurion, unable to put together another governing coalition, continued as the interim prime minister until the new election in the summer. MAPAI won the summer election but lost seats in the Knesset, and Eshkol cobbled a narrow coalition for Ben Gurion. The leaders of the centrist Liberal Party and the leftist MAPAM were now in opposition, which was significant in opening the nuclear issue in the Knesset.

The new Ben Gurion government was presented to the Knesset in November 1961. It survived only twenty months, until Ben Gurion’s final resignation in June 1963. During this time Ben Gurion was still prime minister, but he functioned like an old constitutional monarch. It was during this period that a debate on Israel’s future military doctrine took place.

In 1957–58 Ben Gurion had the authority, power, and will to initiate, on his own, a secret nuclear project. In 1962–63 he had lost the political authority and will to make major nuclear decisions on his own. Furthermore, decisions on military doctrine, organization, and budget allocation required a national consent. For that, a domestic debate over nuclear issues had to take place.

The primary reason for the public debate in Israel over nuclear issues in 1962–63 was that the nuclear issue was tied to a political agenda. The Dimona reactor was nearing completion, as Egypt tested its first missiles in July 1962. Israel had to decide on the direction and pace of the project: What nuclear posture should Israel be seeking, and how quickly should it do so? Should Israel build nuclear weapons and incorporate them into its military doctrine?

The debate had different degrees of openness in various forums, some public and others closed: academic circles, MAPAI bodies, committees of the Knesset, and political and military organs. The facts and terms of the debate were obscured as military censorship and self-censorship reinforced each other. Those involved adhered to the principle of kdushat ha’bitachon (the sacredness of security). The debate was often portrayed as taking place between the proponents and opponents of nuclear weapons,¹⁰ but this is inaccurate. The real debate was hidden, and it was not about nuclear weapons as such.

Dimona was no longer a state secret after December 1960, but Israeli politicians and commentators had no desire to discuss the subject openly. It was possible to raise questions about the scientific and financial soundness of the project as it was officially presented, but few did.¹¹ The issue of whether Israel should introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East was also hardly explored.

Questions regarding the nuclear issue surfaced in early 1962. In an article in Ha’aretz, entitled “A Last Moment Warning,” Eliezer Livneh, a prominent socialist intellectual and former MAPAI leader, raised the question of Israel’s future military doctrine: should Israel change its military doctrine to rely on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? Livneh argued that the nuclearization of the Arab-Israeli conflict would be catastrophic to the region, and even more so to Israel. Thus Israel should not introduce nuclear weapons into the region.¹²

Two months later Livneh organized a small group of prominent Israelis to sign a petition urging the Israeli government to take a diplomatic initiative to ban the introduction of nuclear weapons to the region. Among the signers were philosophers and scholars such as Martin Buber, Efraim Auerbach, and Yeshayahu Leibovitz; two former members of the IAEC who resigned in 1958—Gabriel Stein and Franz Ollendorff; religious leaders; and one Knesset member—Shlomo Zalman Abramov of the Liberal Party. The group presented itself as nonpartisan, made of Zionist Jews from both the Left and Right, whose sole interest was in preventing the nuclearization of the region.¹³

There was no direct official response to the petition. Unofficially, however, the Ministry of Defense made efforts to delegitimize the committee, insinuating that its activity was damaging national security.¹⁴ In the wake of Egypt’s test of its rockets in July 1962 and its boast that those rockets could reach any targets “south of Tel Aviv,” spokesmen for the Israeli defense establishment spoke openly of increasing danger to Israeli security. Peres, Chief of Staff Zvi Zur, and others made oblique references to Israel’s need to revise its security doctrine in light of the missile race.¹⁵

There were plenty of hints that serious discussions were under way. The press reported of discussions in the cabinet and in the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee devoted to changes in military capabilities and Israel’s need to acquire “weapons of deterrence.”¹⁶ In a seven-page report to the State Department, dated 7 October, Ambassador Barbour linked this public campaign to a new concept or doctrine of national security advocated by the “Young MAPAI” group. Barbour’s report observed a relationship between the emerging Young MAPAI concept and the Egyptian missile threat.¹⁷

The government made no official statement on the nuclear issue beyond Ben Gurion’s statement to the Knesset, but Peres became, during the summer and fall of 1962, the unofficial spokesman of the new deterrent advocacy group. In interviews, he invoked the idea that a “missile race” had started and that the arms race was now about pituach technologi (technological development).¹⁸ Without explicitly advocating the bomb, Peres insinuated the notion that Israel must develop new and powerful “deterrent weapons” not only to win the war but also to warn its Arab enemies of coming to the “wrong conclusions.”¹⁹ He hinted that Israel might soon be forced to adopt a new “military doctrine” in view of the new weapons in Arab hands, making this one of the gravest periods in Israel’s history.²⁰ Peres attacked those who called for a ban on nuclear weapons; disarmament, he stressed, must relate to all weapons. As long as the Arabs preached the destruction of Israel, Israel must be prepared.²¹

The Egyptian missile launch in July and the new deterrence rhetoric from the Israeli defense establishment led some of the signers of the denuclearization petition, especially Livneh, Abramov, Stein, and Auerbach, to push their antinuclear activities further. In the summer of 1962, with the quiet support of Nahum Goldman, the president of the World Zionist Organization, they founded a new citizen lobby, named the Committee for the Denuclearization of the Middle East. Although only ten to twenty people attended the meetings, which were held in the residence of one of the participants, the group became a loud antinuclear voice in Israel.²² It lobbied primarily before the leaderships of the nation’s political parties, and attempted to educate the intelligentsia of the dangers of nuclear weapons in the region.²³ Given the scientific and political weight of the committee’s leaders, they had access to prominent political figures in both the governing coalition and the opposition parties.²⁴

The committee’s starting point was that the atomic bomb was a distinct type of weapon with the potential to destroy the entire Zionist experiment. Given Israel’s geopolitical and demographic situation, it could not, and should not, tolerate the nuclearization of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Israel would never be safe if nuclear weapons were to fall into Arab hands, and the only way to prevent such a danger was to ban nuclear weapons in the region altogether. The presumption was that an Israeli advantage in this field would be short-lived; sooner or later the Arabs would either produce their own weapons or purchase them from a nuclear power. The only way to prevent the nuclearization of the region was through a political agreement among the parties to create a Middle East free of nuclear weapons. It was up to Israel to determine the nuclear future of the region.²⁵

Though the committee framed its public opposition to nuclear weapons in regional terms, the context was domestic. Aware that important decisions on the nuclear issue were soon to be made, its leaders wanted to alert the Israeli public, especially parliamentarians, of the significance of the decisions. From the second part of 1962 until 1964, Livneh and his associates were involved in efforts, which were at times politically awkward, to communicate their concerns to leaders of all the mainstream Zionist parties in order to force the issue into parliamentary discussions.

Livneh and his friends saw themselves as the intellectual and moral guard against the nuclear activism of the prime minister’s office and the Ministry of Defense. Given the dynamics of technological development, the committee was aware of the short path from a nuclear option to actually producing a bomb once the infrastructure was completed, and was concerned that, under the shroud of secrecy, Ben Gurion could make critical decisions without political consultations.²⁶

The public side of the debate of 1962 was inhibited; neither side in the debate was able, or willing, to speak freely. Officially there was no Israeli nuclear weapons program to reinforce either argument, so in order to express their message both sides had to use code words and phrases, such as “new deterrent weapons” and “regional denuclearization.” This was particularly difficult on the committee.²⁷ It could not state its real concerns and fears about the Israeli program, for it would be considered revealing state secrets. Committee members had to be mindful of how far to push their critique without crossing the line, legally and politically. Aware of this, the committee insisted on using only public information, which weakened its critical position. The committee’s ostensible objectives—regional efforts for denuclearization—looked hypothetical and unrealistic, while it was inhibited from stating publicly its real worry: that Ben Gurion and Peres would push Israel and the region to nuclearization.²⁸

The story of the committee, however, is only a footnote in the political history of Israel’s nuclear policy. The committee’s warnings of the dangers of nuclearization failed to reach the Israeli public. It also failed to politicize the nuclear issue. The leaders of all the Zionist parties who listened to its arguments were reluctant to politicize its cause.

In the end the committee’s advise was ignored. Israel acquired nuclear weapons, and the committee’s predictions did not materialize. The committee, however, was not entirely irrelevant. It maintained occasional contacts with cabinet ministers who had reservations about nuclear weapons—Israel Barzilay and Mordechai Bentov of MAPAM, Israel Galili and others of Achdut Ha’Avodah, Chaim Moshe Shapira of the National Religious Party, and Pinhas Sapir of MAPAI. The decisions of 1962–63, unlike those of 1956–58, were made through a process of debate in which the Israeli nuclear position was discussed. The committee contributed to this end.

Independently of the committee, distinguished Israeli scientists, including Amos de Shalit of the Weizmann Institute, briefed leading parliamentarians on the nuclear issue. Subsequently, during the spring of 1962, all the major Zionist parties in the Knesset were engaged in closed-door consultations, mostly informal, on the nuclear question. It was the first time that members of the Knesset reflected on the Israeli nuclear program. It was also the first time that the political parties had to make up their own minds on the issue.²⁹

The internal discussions took place first among the opposition parties, notably the Liberal Party and MAPAM. The issues were twofold: first, whether Israel should build nuclear weapons or act to denuclearize the region, and, second, what should be the Knesset’s role in overseeing the Dimona project. Many felt that, this time, the Knesset should not be bypassed on the issue as it had been five years earlier.³⁰

In March, Elimelech Rimalt, the president of the Liberal Party met MAPAM leaders to discuss the issue, noting that his party had reached no official position thus far. In May the Liberal Party discussed the matter in its official political forum, and found itself to be divided. The difficulty was owing to the moral and political consequences of the decision.³¹ Ben Gurion responded with silence when the issue was raised by his coalition partners in a cabinet meeting.³²

Members of the Knesset in all the major parties expressed sympathy for the idea of denuclearizing the Middle East and pressed for further discussions, but it became evident that no party, with the exception of the Israeli Communist Party, felt comfortable politicizing the nuclear issue by either favoring or denouncing it. To take a substantial stand on this issue meant to challenge Ben Gurion’s official statements of December 1960, which no mainstream Zionist party was ready to do. Such a challenge to Ben Gurion could damage the national interest. Ben Gurion’s absolute refusal to discuss the issue also deterred party leaders. Even those few parliamentarians who had concerns about the nuclear program felt that such a move would not be acceptable to the public.³³ In the wake of those informal party consultations, and in light of Ben Gurion’s and Peres’s insistence that the issue must not be discussed in public, it became apparent to most parliamentarians that the Israeli nuclear policy was too sensitive to be transformed into a political issue with which to challenge the government.

The reluctance of the major parties to confront the government on the substance of the nuclear issue did not mean that they were ready to accept the government’s position on the procedural issue of oversight. Parliamentary leaders, especially of the opposition parties, would not abrogate their right to parliamentary oversight, and Ben Gurion himself was interested in forming a discreet parliamentary mechanism which would allow for secret reporting and budgetary approval that would bypass public discussion of the subject.

Concerned party leaders could raise their questions privately with Ben Gurion, rather than confront him publicly. Sometime in late 1962 or early 1963, the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee of the Knesset founded an ad-hoc secret subcommittee, first known as the committee of seven (it was composed of seven senior representatives of all the parties, with representation at the full committee) to discuss nuclear affairs.³⁴ A similar secret subcommittee was established by the Finance Committee to look into the financial aspects of the Dimona project.³⁵

This was a convenient solution for both the executive and legislative branches. Like in other Western democracies, the Israeli Knesset did not evince an appetite for meddling in nuclear affairs. Even those MAPAI ministers, who had earlier reservations about the nuclear project, especially Meir and Sapir, were not interested in bringing their case for discussion at party forums. As for other parties, the arrangement allowed them to drop the nuclear issue without betraying their parliamentary duties. The issue was discussed in closed, informal forums, without forming a party line. Israel’s parliamentary system was too uncomfortable with making the nuclear question a public issue; thus secrecy had an inhibiting effect on both the public and its politicians.³⁶

These issues related to military doctrine and organization, and to budgetary and political considerations. The choices involved were not of the either-or kind; rather, the choices to be made were arrayed along a proliferation ladder. At its top was full membership in the nuclear club (i.e., testing a bomb, accumulating an arsenal, restructuring the army, developing a nuclear doctrine). At its bottom were the maintenance of the physical and research nuclear infrastructure needed to maintain a nuclear option to be utilized if circumstances changed.

As a sign of Ben Gurion’s increasing political weakness, a coalition agreement between MAPAI and Achdut Ha’Avodah of 10 October 1961 imposed formal limits on Ben Gurion’s ability to act alone in the area of defense. In an appendix to this agreement, entitled “Ministerial Committee,” the two parties agreed that the “development of new weapons systems to be deployed by the IDF” must first be discussed by the Defense Ministerial Committee.³⁷ This clause was not the result of developments in the nuclear field,³⁸ but expressed the principle that important strategic decisions could not be made by Ben Gurion alone.

By 1962 two schools of military thought emerged in Israel and engaged in a debate on the nation’s future military doctrine and army force structure. I refer to the first school as the “technological-nuclear” approach and to the other as the “conventionalist” school. The immediate question at stake was how the IDF should invest its limited funds.³⁹ The chief advocates of the technological-nuclear school were Peres and Dayan. Their arguments echoed Ben Gurion’s pessimism about the continuation of the arms race and his interest in long-term deterrence that may eventually even bring about peace. They argued that only advanced weapons could provide Israel with the stable deterrence it needed without being caught up in an increasingly hopeless conventional arms race. They made the point that the continuation of the conventional arms race would drain the Israeli economy and tempt the Arabs to prolong the conflict. Israel could not afford to lose even once, and each victory would be increasingly expensive in terms of human lives and materiel; therefore Israel must be in a position effectively to deter the Arabs from waging war.

Peres and Dayan urged “to equip the army for tomorrow,” that is, that Israel should invest its limited human and financial resources in technological developments of new deterrent weapons.⁴⁰ Nuclear weapons were the most effective deterrent against war, and they would eventually convince the Arabs to come to political terms with the reality of Israel. Moreover, in the absence of a superpower security guarantee to Israel, these weapons would be Israel’s independent security guarantee. This was what Peres called “the doctrine of self-reliance.”⁴¹

The chief protagonists of the conventionalist school were the leaders of Achdut Ha’Avodah, Minister of Labor Yigal Allon, the former PALMACH commander who was considered one of the military heroes of the War of Independence, and Israel Galili, formerly the chief of staff of the Haganah, whose views on matters of national security were highly regarded. The conventionalist school rejected the two presumptions of the Dayan-Peres analysis, dismissing the pessimism underlying the belief that nuclear weapons were the only solution for Israel’s long-term security and, more important, raising doubts about the applicability of nuclear deterrence—the balance of terror—to the Middle East. Conventionalist military doctrine, built on modern mobile armor and a strong tactical air force, should keep Israel secure for many years to come. Furthermore, conventionalists maintained that any Israeli nuclear monopoly would be only a short-term transitional stage, soon to be replaced by a nuclearized Middle East. Even if Egypt were not able to keep up with Israel, it is likely that the Soviets would not allow Israel to maintain a nuclear monopoly. Given the geopolitical and demographic asymmetries of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it would not be in Israel’s national interest to nuclearize the conflict; an investment in nuclear weapons would weaken the IDF and might encourage the Arabs to wage another war.⁴²

By mid-1962 the debate appears to have reached the moment of decision. According to one account, one forum in which the debate took place was a secret memorial conference for Elyahu Golomb, a former head of the Haganah, with the participation of Ben Gurion, Peres, Allon, Dayan, Galili, and Yigael Yadin. Ben Gurion rejected Allon’s doctrine of preventive war, but he did accept Allon’s recommendations to purchase more armor and tactical aircraft.⁴³ In his writings Allon describes a slightly different version of the debate, using vague language. It took place, says Allon, in the Ministerial Committee on Security Affairs when the chief of staff of the IDF, Zvi Zur, requested an additional budget to create a new armored brigade, but “a minister proposed to appropriate the funds [which Zur requested] to accelerate important scientific research.” Allon, who supported the army’s request, added that the vote between the armor and the “important scientific research” was divided “half-and-half,” until Ben Gurion, prime minister and committee chair, added his own vote to the armor camp, saying, “We cannot put all our eggs in one basket.”⁴⁴

According to Arnan (Sini) Azaryahu, a close friend and advisor to Israel Galili, sometime in 1962 Ben Gurion arranged a small, informal, high-level conference for which both camps prepared position papers. The conference, which might have been held at Dimona, was attended by Ben Gurion, Dayan, Peres, Eshkol, Allon, and Galili (and possibly a few others). Dayan presented the argument for the technological-nuclearist strategy, pointing out that time and demography worked against Israel, which would soon exhaust its resources in the conventional arms race with the Arabs. The bomb, because of its relatively low cost over time, was the only solution to the Israeli security problem.⁴⁵

Galili then presented the arguments of the conventionalist camp. Referring to the superpowers’ seemingly stable balance of terror, Galili pointed out that the geopolitical situation in the Middle East was different from the superpowers’ situation, and that a Middle Eastern nuclear balance of terror was likely to be fragile because of the asymmetries among the parties. The incentive to launch a first strike would be high, and it would be difficult, if not impossible, to secure a second strike. Furthermore, Galili and Allon argued that shifting the IDF to a nuclearized force structure would not save funds—the conventional army could not be made much smaller and it would continue to purchase tanks and aircraft—but would weaken the Israeli army, which could, in turn, trigger Arab aggression.

Their final argument was that a nonnuclear Middle East was preferable for Israel. Israel should not build nuclear weapons because this would lead, sooner or later, to Arab nuclearization. Galili and Allon did not propose that Israel should not engage in research and development of nuclear weapons and missiles. Rather, Israel should keep the nuclear option open, always remaining ahead of the Arabs in this field. According to this version, despite his sympathy to Peres’s and Dayan’s arguments, Ben Gurion sided with the argument of Allon and Galili for continuing to strengthen the conventional army.⁴⁶

Few facts on the debate have been released, and no public record of it exists. The eyewitness accounts are also incomplete. It is not clear whether the Dimona conference was the event to which Allon and Gilboa alluded. All the sources, however, agree that Ben Gurion, in his last year in office, decided to buy more tanks and not to advance the nuclear project further. His decision may have been motivated more by political and technical considerations than by doctrine. His 1962 decision established an important strategic precedent: He decided that Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Ben Gurion apparently used this phrase in a meeting with Israel’s newspaper editors.⁴⁷

Peres, in an article published in late 1962 in the IDF monthly publication, Ma’archot, in addressing the “time dimension” in the Arab-Israeli conflict, specified five strategic changes in the Arab-Israeli status quo that may lead to another Arab-Israeli war.⁴⁸ The first three relate to strategic changes that the Arabs could introduce, and the last two refer to changes that Israel could introduce or be perceived to introduce. The fifth item on Peres’s list is most relevant to our discussion: “If Israel acquires an unpredictable power, real or imagined, the Arabs will react vehemently.”

In his visit to the United States earlier that year, Peres was told by his hosts that if the Egyptians became convinced that Israel acquired, or was about to acquire, nuclear weapons, they could launch a preemptive war. By late 1962 Peres appeared to have accepted this view and qualified his pronuclear weapons position: an introduction of Israeli nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be an Arab casus belli. Whether this became Peres’s conviction in the wake of Ben Gurion’s decision or following his discussion in the United States, is unclear. This is also what he told President Kennedy when he met with him in April 1963.