Israel and the Bomb

Ben Gurion had initiated the Israeli nuclear program, but the challenges Eshkol faced were equally daunting. Eshkol not only had to protect the project from powerful external pressures, but he was also the only Israeli prime minister who had to deal with the nuclear question as part of the political debate at home, something Ben Gurion never quite had to do. Just as Eshkol’s approach to the nuclear question evolved in response to the security discussions with the United States, it was also shaped by domestic Israeli politics and strategic and economic concerns.

The antinuclear proponents in the early 1960s, whom Ben Gurion easily shrugged off, were weak and came from the margins of Israeli body politics. In 1965–66 this was no longer the case. This time it was the pronuclear voices, Ben Gurion and his followers, that stirred the debate—people with knowledge of the issue who could and did challenge Eshkol. As the break between Eshkol and Ben Gurion deepened in 1964–66, the nuclear issue emerged as a major, if implied, theme in Ben Gurion’s campaign to delegitimize Eshkol as a national leader.

The break with Ben Gurion, and Peres’s resignation from his post at the Ministry of Defense, created yet another challenge for Eshkol. When Peres was forced out, Eshkol decided it was time to exert political control over the secret project. He restructured the IAEC, until then not much more than an empty label, and decided that its chair must be the prime minister himself. Subsequent prime ministers followed the same arrangement.

Eshkol had to walk a fine line between resolve and caution abroad and at home. Under Eshkol’s leadership, Israel completed the necessary steps for establishing a rudimentary nuclear option. Eshkol, however, was also the first Israeli prime minister to pledge publicly that Israel would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, thus making nuclear ambivalence a national policy. Succeeding prime ministers have followed this policy.

This attitude was apparent in the most sensitive topic he inherited from Ben Gurion—President Kennedy’s demand for two American visits per year to Dimona. Eshkol knew how important Dimona had been to his predecessor and, in preparing his reply to Kennedy in July–August 1963, he consulted with him. He recognized that his reply to Kennedy would have serious domestic consequences for his leadership, and he made sure to signal that, on this issue at least, he would continue Ben Gurion’s policies. He set up a system to pass on sensitive documents to Ben Gurion at Sdeh Boker, especially the correspondence with Kennedy and de Gaulle.² Eshkol kept Peres as his deputy minister of defense, as Ben Gurion had urged, and even tried to extend Peres’s authority.³

In his first year as prime minister, Eshkol made it clear that Ben Gurion’s nuclear commitments would be honored. Ben Gurion’s commitments to Kennedy—claiming that Dimona was for peaceful purposes, allowing the precedent of U.S. visits to Dimona, and permitting the United States to reassure President Nasser on the nature of Dimona—hamstrung Eshkol when it came to replying to Kennedy’s letter. He could have changed Ben Gurion’s policy, as Golda Meir had proposed, but he decided to adhere to Ben Gurion’s commitments (on Eshkol’s 19 August 1963 reply to Kennedy, see chapter 7). He followed this policy in his exchanges with the Johnson administration before and during his first visit to the United States in May 1964 (see chapter 11).

The indications of a rift between Ben Gurion and Eshkol appeared during the first year of Eshkol’s government. While publicly pledging to continue Ben Gurion’s policies, Eshkol’s actions signaled a change. The first shot in the war between the two men was fired in May 1964, when Eshkol and other senior MAPAI members invited Pinhas Lavon and his supporters to return to political activity in the party—in effect, reversing the 1961 MAPAI decision to remove Lavon from his position as head of the Histadrut. Ben Gurion was outraged by what he called the “illegal action” of Eshkol. In October Ben Gurion submitted to the attorney general new evidence on the Lavon Affair and asked Eshkol to appoint a judicial investigative committee to reopen the case. Eshkol decided against that, and the party leadership supported him. The final confrontation took place at the MAPAI convention in February 1965. Ben Gurion’s demand to launch a judicial inquiry into the Lavon Affair was rejected in a party central committee vote (60 percent opposed the inquiry). Many of Ben Gurion’s supporters considered their loss—by a thin margin—a respectable showing, but Ben Gurion was no longer interested in party politics. He wanted to remove Eshkol altogether and was ready to take his fight to the people.

The break between Eshkol and Ben Gurion in 1964–65 was about more than the Lavon Affair. Since assuming office, Eshkol had become more of a prime minister and a party leader in his own right, and less of a caretaker on behalf of Ben Gurion. Eshkol explored a political alliance with Achdut Ha’Avodah, a leftist movement whose leaders, Israel Galili and Yigal Allon, offered an alternative outlook on national security from that offered by Ben Gurion’s protégés, Shimon Peres and Moshe Dayan.

The struggle also symbolized the end of one era and the beginning of another; from a period of laying the foundations and creating new realities to one of maintaining and strengthening the existing edifice. The transition from Ben Gurion’s visionary Zionism to Eshkol’s more down-to-earth version reflected the changes that had to be made in the nuclear project. For Ben Gurion the nuclear-weapons option was a hope and a dream. Eshkol, on the other hand, had to attend to the financial and bureaucratic needs of an existing organization. The break between Ben Gurion and Eshkol may not have started over the nuclear issue, but it had far-reaching consequences for Israel’s nuclear history.

A few weeks after the MAPAI convention the New York Times reported that the United States had conducted a second visit to Dimona.⁴ The article embarrassed Eshkol. It meant that Eshkol agreed to an inspection arrangement that implied a possible violation of Israeli sovereignty, and may have also compromised the central element of the nation’s security. The political timing of the leak was particularly inconvenient to Eshkol. It occurred within weeks of the final break with Ben Gurion, and only days after the Harriman-Komer visit. The Israeli public had no clue that Robert Komer had pressed hard but accomplished nothing regarding Dimona, and that it was Eshkol who had conducted the negotiations with mastery and skill. Yet the article gave way to rumors that Eshkol, unlike Ben Gurion, was “soft” on Dimona. It was rumored that the U.S. visits to Dimona would lead to the slowing down or freezing of the nuclear project and that this was one of the reasons for the deterioration of his relations with Ben Gurion.⁵

The leak was played up in the Israeli press. Ha’aretz editorialized that American pressure overwhelmed considerations of national sovereignty, although it did not mean that Israel may have good reasons to allow the visits. Even so, the editorial urged the government to make these reasons public, perhaps through a statement by Eshkol to the Knesset.⁶ A day later Ha’aretz reported that the decision to allow the American visit was made against the objections of some of Eshkol’s “senior advisers,” who warned against “surrender” to the U.S. on this issue.⁷ The right-wing Herut charged that the government deceived and confused the public by playing semantic games with “visits” and “inspections.” Whatever the arrangements, they undermined Israeli sovereignty without Israel receiving anything in return. The pro-government papers Davar and La’merhav argued that there was a real difference between visits and inspections; there was nothing wrong with the visits and the leaks were politically motivated. They, too, urged Eshkol to give a public explanation.⁸ Within days Eshkol made a statement to the Knesset that, since 1961, Israel had permitted visits of American scientists to Dimona—not inspections or supervisions, but visits—and that the visits were part of the cooperative scientific relationship between the United States and Israel. The claim that the visits violated Israeli sovereignty was groundless.

Weeks after the leak, in a series of harsh public attacks on Eshkol’s character and integrity, Ben Gurion alleged that Eshkol, by his actions, “was no longer qualified to lead the nation.”⁹ Ben Gurion’s charges were interpreted by some to mean that Ben Gurion blamed his heir for compromising Israel’s nuclear sovereignty. As the Ben Gurion-Eshkol clash escalated, Eshkol forced Ben Gurion’s supporters in his cabinet to make up their mind: either serve as loyal ministers under his leadership or openly support Ben Gurion and quit. Peres recognized that under the circumstances he could no longer serve Eshkol, and resigned. He tried to prevent a split in MAPAI, but to no avail. Ben Gurion also left little choice for his supporters when he founded a new political movement, Israel’s Workers List (RAFI), to challenge Eshkol in the upcoming election.¹⁰ Peres found himself in the awkward position of being in a leading position in a new political party born out of whims he did not share, having to fight the man with whom he had served closely the last two years.¹¹

The election campaign of 1965 was one of the most bitter in Israel’s history. It was dominated by an old man’s rage against the successor he himself had chosen. It was also about whether Israel still needed the visionary demands of its aging founder or whether it was secure enough to move to a new kind of leadership. The dramatic story of the rift between the two men notwithstanding, RAFI had to translate Ben Gurion’s vengeance into the language of politics and ideology. It was in this way that the nuclear issue became a political theme—the only campaign in Israel’s history in which that subject was even mentioned. The use of the nuclear weapons issue was subtle and implied, much of it spoken, not written, but it was an integral part of RAFI’s political message.

RAFI portrayed itself as the party of change, the only party advocating technological independence, strong deterrence, and a change in the election system. Science and technology were presented as the new challenges of postindependence Zionism. Its campaign emphasized the commitment and record of its leaders, many with scientific, technocratic, and managerial credentials, particularly in the area of technology-based military industries. References were also made to the role of the party’s leaders in the construction of Dimona. RAFI was nicknamed “the atomic party.” The MAPAI-Achdut Ha’Avodah alliance was presented as the product of the Old Guard, led by a tired, spent leadership lacking in vision and vigor, unqualified to lead Israel into the technological and nuclear age.

Barely concealed in the RAFI campaign was the message that Eshkol had betrayed his role as custodian of the nation’s nuclear project. No explicit allegations were made, but although the charges were only insinuated, they came from people who were assumed to be in the know. During the 1962 debate between the conventional warfare school of Galili and Allon, and the nuclear deterrence school of Peres and Dayan, the nuclear theme surfaced here and there, but it remained too obscure to be noticed by the Israeli public. In the 1965 election campaign the debate over nuclear issues came much closer to the surface.

On 2 November 1965 Eshkol won the elections. It was regarded as a national vote of confidence in his showdown with Ben Gurion. Leading the MAPAI-Achdut Ha’Avodah alliance, he won a comfortable victory that enabled him to form a new government in which he continued to hold the posts of prime minister and minister of defense. Ben Gurion lost the fight, his RAFI party winning only ten seats in the Knesset. Its leaders, Peres and Dayan, were, for the first time in their public life, outside the center of national decision making. Galili and Allon of Achdut Ha’Avodah, after fifteen years of waiting on the sidelines, were now invited by Eshkol to assume lead roles in national decisions.¹²

This change also had profound implications for the nuclear program. Ben Gurion, Peres, and Bergmann, the three men who had initiated the nuclear program a decade earlier, no longer had a say in shaping its future. They were replaced by officials who disagreed with the pro-nuclear position of Peres and Dayan. Eshkol’s close aide from the Treasury Department, Zvi Dinstein, an economist and capable bureaucrat with no experience in strategic, let alone nuclear, affairs replaced Peres at the Ministry of Defense, first as Eshkol’s senior aide and, after the 1965 elections, as the new deputy minister of defense. In that capacity Dinstein became the chief administrator of all R&D activities in the ministry. Already in January 1964 Yitzhak Rabin, a skeptic with regard to technological self-reliance in general and of “science-based” deterrence in particular, replaced the pro-technology Zvi Zur as the IDF chief of staff. Rabin, a PALMACH senior officer in the War of Independence, was close to the leaders of Achdut Ha’Avodah, particularly to his former commander, Allon. Eshkol thus surrounded himself with people who were not enthusiastic about the nuclear project. These individuals were now in charge of making policy decisions concerning the project’s future.

Peres had run the Ministry of Defense as director-general and deputy minister of defense from 1953 to 1965. His management style shaped the organizational and personnel structure of the ministry. He established a decentralized structure of research, development, and production, based on quasi-autonomous organizations and government-owned companies, allowing him to run the ministry on a divide-and-rule approach. After Peres left, Eshkol asked Dinstein to overhaul the entire R&D structure of the ministry, including the defense industries (the Israel Aviation Industry and the Military Industries), the IAEC, and RAFAEL. As Dinstein recalls almost thirty years later, the task Eshkol gave him was “to bring economic thinking into a bureaucratic structure that ideologically defied it for so long.” The situation he found at the ministry was contrary to proper management principles: “There was no clear hierarchical framework, no clear chain of command, no procedures on who was doing what, no definitive division of labor, no clear-cut procedures about projects. Everything was small and personal.”¹³

The issues at stake were both economic management and political loyalty, and the distinctions between the two were blurred owing to differences over R&D matters between Eshkol and Dinstein, on the one hand, and Ben Gurion and Peres, on the other. Eshkol’s and Dinstein’s backgrounds were in accounting and finance, and for them the problem at the Ministry of Defense was lack of efficiency and management. The R&D system they inherited seemed wasteful, devoid of any principle of financial accountability, even lacking procedures for financial oversight and quality control. In 1965 Israel was heading toward an economic recession, and waste in the Ministry of Defense became especially glaring to economists such as Eshkol and Dinstein.

By late summer 1965 Dinstein demanded major organizational changes in RAFAEL, insisting on changing the system by which RAFAEL was operating, particularly its budgeting procedure. According to the old system, a central budget was allocated for all RAFAEL activities within the Ministry of Defense’s overall budget, based on the projects that had been proposed by the management of RAFAEL and approved by the minister and his deputy on the recommendations of the general staff and the minister’s scientific adviser. Dinstein, following Rabin’s suggestions, insisted instead that each R&D project be sponsored and budgeted either by the IDF or one of the ministry’s bureaucracies. It should be up to the sponsoring agency, not the developers at RAFAEL, to specify the technical requirements for the product under development.¹⁴

In addition, Dinstein wanted to strengthen the office of the scientific adviser as an independent scientific oversight board serving the minister and his deputy. That Ernst Bergmann had three offices—at RAFAEL, the Ministry of Defense, and the IAEC—seemed to Dinstein to be an example of a conflict of interests. Bergmann could not function as the in-house chief scientist at RAFAEL, the chair of the IAEC, and also oversee and evaluate the projects on behalf of the minister of defense.

The nuclear program, because of its sensitivity and cost, was at the center of the storm. Because of the way Peres set up the program—not under one organization, like the Manhattan Project, but divided under a number of organizations, each reporting directly only to his office—major problems arose as the program grew, especially management and communication difficulties among its various elements. There were hardly any channels of communication, for example, between Dimona’s boss, Manes Pratt, and other bureaucracies involved in the nuclear weapons program.¹⁵ Pratt particularly refused to accept Bergmann’s authority, despite Bergmann’s three titles, as the coordinator of all national nuclear activities. At one time Pratt even declared Bergmann a “security risk” and denied him access to the Dimona site.¹⁶ Nor was Pratt prepared to accept instructions from anyone else at the ministry, except Peres and Ben Gurion.¹⁷

This organizational maze and lack of proper coordination became a major problem for the nuclear project by the mid-1960s. From the time the program was set up, built on a number of interrelated but independent projects, real authority for the program had been closely held in Peres’s hands. Accepted as Ben Gurion’s long-time and trusted executor, Peres’s authority was accepted by all the leaders of the bureaucracies involved. Peres personally selected the leaders of the various organizations and units, assigned them their missions within the program, and oversaw their progress. The unconventional means he used for funding the program, and his tendency to institutionalize redundancy through “friendly competition” among the various organizations involved, increased their dependence on him as the ultimate authority. All major financial and organizational decisions had to be made by him, at times without the knowledge of other program leaders. In the absence of an independent scientific authority to evaluate and assess all aspects of the program—Bergmann was moved to the sidelines as the program progressed—the primary research and development establishment involved saw itself as being in charge of the entire project.¹⁸

For Eshkol and Dinstein, such Byzantine management was not only financially wasteful, but it also created a problem of political control over the nation’s most sensitive program. In 1965 Bergmann was still the official head of the IAEC and R&D at the Ministry of Defense, but without the trust of either the new regime or many of the program’s own senior technical leaders; he was seen as a major part of the problem. The idea of creating a new professional administration in charge of all aspects of the nation’s nuclear program activities, directly accountable to Eshkol (in his roles as prime minister and minister of defense), was talked about for a long time and even endorsed by Bergmann himself in 1964 (as he realized that somebody else needed to replace him in that job), but it was Peres’s resignation and his replacement by Dinstein that made it possible and necessary.¹⁹

This proposed new administration was thought to function as the technical and financial authority overseeing all aspects of the nuclear program, not merely as a scientific advisory body but also as a body with executive powers. Decisions on all aspects of the program—technical, financial, organizational, and political—would come from one authority directly under the control of the prime minister. Sometime in the spring or summer of 1965, while on a visit to the United States, Dinstein offered the job to Yuval Ne’eman, then a visiting scientist at the U.S. National Laboratory at Brookhaven, who declined. Instead, he recommended Israel Dostrovsky of the Weizmann Institute for the job (rather than General Dan Tolkovski, the former commander of the Israeli Air Force, Dinstein’s original candidate).²⁰ By late 1965, after Eshkol’s election victory and his appointment of Dinstein as deputy minister of defense, the search continued apace. In early spring 1966 Dostrovsky, the former head of HEMED GIMMEL, agreed to become the head of IAEC in its enhanced organizational form.

To make the reorganization work, and to be consistent with Dinstein’s plan to introduce economic thinking into the Ministry of Defense, other organizational changes in personnel and authority in the R&D structure, some unrelated to the nuclear issue, had to be made. First, Dinstein fired Manes Pratt, the director of Dimona, and replaced him with Yossef Tulipman, a former senior official at Dimona who had been forced out by Pratt. It was felt that Pratt was no longer the right person to run Dimona under the new organization. To build Dimona from scratch was one task, but to run it as a major organization (Kirya Le’mechkar Gariini—Israel’s Nuclear Research Center—or KAMAG in its Hebrew acronym) was another. This change in personnel was difficult but politically straightforward.²¹

The real struggle was with Munya Mardor, the director-general of RAFAEL. Mardor was reluctant to accept Dinstein’s proposed reorganization. In his autobiography Mardor devoted three long chapters to telling his story of what he called “the battle for the life of RAFAEL.”²² The story is a selective account in two senses—it is Mardor’s truth as he saw it and also the unclassified version of that account—but it is still the only available written account of the drama.

According to Mardor, the issues involved in the dispute with Dinstein were two separate and only loosely interrelated ones: first, how RAFAEL, as a research and development authority, should be run: what its philosophy should be, and its appropriate size; second, a dispute over the control and oversight of one specific “leading project,” that is, the bomb project.

As to the first issue, Dinstein’s proposed changes questioned the very philosophy on which RAFAEL (and earlier EMET), as Israel’s central defense R&D authority, was founded and run. This philosophy, based on Ben Gurion’s vision, was that Israel must be on the cutting edge of technology, and therefore RAFAEL must maintain its sovereignty in selecting the areas of basic research for future defense projects. This was the idea behind the commitment to a qualitative edge on which RAFAEL was founded in 1958 by Ben Gurion, Peres, Bergmann, and Mardor. It must be up to the RAFAEL leadership, with the approval of the minister and his deputy, to identify new technologies and fields of research for long-term projects. The selection and identification of appropriate projects, especially in the area of basic research, must not be imposed on RAFAEL by army officers. The R&D horizons of RAFAEL must go beyond the military needs of the moment. On this issue, there were frequent clashes in early and mid-1960 between the two philosophies, one that advocated purchasing military hardware off the shelf (Chief of Staff Rabin’s view) and the other that highlighted the commitment to technological self-reliance (Peres’s view). Dinstein’s proposed reforms, especially his strict budgetary procedures, meant (from Mardor’s perspective) that RAFAEL would no longer be the supreme policy-making authority on all defense R&D matters, but would be a central R&D agency providing services to the IDF and the Ministry of Defense as a prime contractor. Also, under the proposed reform plan, about a third of RAFAEL employees (approximately 450 people) would be laid off. For Mardor, the changes meant the end of what Peres, Bergmann, and he had built and cherished since the early 1950s.²³

Dinstein saw things from a different perspective. For him, RAFAEL’s excessive sovereignty was at the root of the lack of accountability and coordination that led to financial waste. He saw RAFAEL as a self-enclosed, elitist R&D organization that operated more like an academic research center than a provider of services to the military. He noted that many of its projects never came to fruition. Given Peres’s authority, it meant that he (Peres), Bergmann, and Mardor made all the R&D decisions on their own, whether or not they related to the actual needs of the IDF. This arrangement gave enormous budgetary freedom to the RAFAEL leadership to entertain “the whims of its senior scientists,” as long as Peres and Bergmann approved. There was a need to introduce “economic thinking” and “quality control” into a system that fundamentally lacked “financial accountability.”²⁴

Then there was the second dispute about the responsibility for the “leading development project.” According to Mardor, among Dinstein’s organizational proposals was one that transferred “direct control of key technical units involved in one of the central projects under the responsibility of the Authority” to another “staff unit” at the Ministry of Defense.²⁵ These key technical units, in Mardor’s account, were engaged in technical coordination and oversight of a number of related subprojects. The removal of these technical staff units indicated, Mardor wrote, an intention to deprive RAFAEL of one of its “leading projects.” For Mardor, the removal of that particular project from the direct responsibility of RAFAEL, given the fact that that “leading project” was, in the summer of 1965, in a “highly advanced state of development,”²⁶ meant a no-confidence vote in RAFAEL. It also meant depriving RAFAEL of the credit for completing the project. In particular, Mardor was angry that, for months, there had been secret discussions about such a transfer, of which neither he nor Bergmann had been aware.²⁷ Mardor never explains what that “leading project” was, and his wording is vague, but the reader is invited to read between the lines and make the interpretative leap that would read the “leading project” to mean the nuclear weapons project.²⁸

The battle over the future of RAFAEL lasted for about five months, from late December 1965 until late April 1966. Mardor saw no other resort but to appeal to Prime Minister Eshkol, mobilizing a powerful lobby to persuade him to overrule Dinstein’s demands. That Bergmann no longer functioned as Eshkol’s chief scientist and no longer had the prime minister’s ear did not make Mardor’s argument any easier. Dinstein was persistent in his demand that Eshkol, as prime minister and minister of defense, and he, as his deputy, must gain direct control over the project.²⁹ Mardor recognized that Dinstein had a point, and proposed various ideas to correct the structural problems, but without depriving RAFAEL of its responsibilities. He suggested, for example, the creation of a scientific board to oversee RAFAEL, manned by some of Israel’s distinguished scientists who were familiar with defense issues and headed by Professor Ephraim Katzir—one of the founders of HEMED—of the Weizmann Institute. If Eshkol did not accept his suggestions, Mardor was determined to resign.³⁰

Mardor left no stone unturned in his efforts to maintain RAFAEL’s control of the project. In his book he maintains that he invited Dinstein and his senior staff to visit that particular “leading project” and meet its chief, Jenka Ratner, and the technical director involved in the supervision of the project, Avraham Hermoni. He also invited the board of scientific advisers associated with the project to review its progress.³¹ Mardor’s point was simple: RAFAEL had brought that particular project to a very advanced level of development, and it would be unfair and demoralizing to the people and organization who carried out the job to take it from them at that point. Mardor lobbied Eshkol through less formal but even more effective messengers: Achdut Ha’Avodah’s leader and Eshkol’s close political ally, Israel Galili, and the legendary Haganah figure, Shaul Avigur. Both talked with Eshkol on Mardor’s behalf.³² Ben Gurion, as an opposition leader, considered Dinstein’s reform as bechia le’dorot (woe for generations), an abandonment of the vision that led him to the establishment of RAFAEL.³³

On 2 April Eshkol met Mardor and Dinstein to discuss the dispute between them. On the specific issue, Dinstein made a case to remove those “key professional units” relevant to the “leading project” from RAFAEL to the other, newly created scientific bureaucracy. His argument was that because the development phase was completed, it became vital now to switch responsibility to the new body. Mardor made his case to keep the project under the direct responsibility of RAFAEL. Some of his main arguments were about the need to preserve the integrity of RAFAEL as Israel’s national defense laboratory.³⁴

In the end, and as was so typical of Eshkol, a compromise of sorts was found that allowed Mardor to stay. The compromise was the result of an informal consultation Eshkol had with three trusted men whom he asked to look at the problem: his minister without portfolio, Galili, and the two Katzir brothers (Aharon and Ephraim) of the Weizmann Institute. It appears that the issue was never brought to the cabinet nor even to the Defense Ministerial Committee; it was resolved in an informal, ad hoc forum whose members, except Eshkol, had no formal responsibility for the matter. As often happened in Israel’s political past, important decisions were made by an informal “kitchen” forum. Bergmann and Peres were told of the compromise; both endorsed it and promised in return not to politicize the issue further.³⁵

Under this compromise, made in a meeting on 19 April, some of Mardor’s arguments about the first issue, that is, the need to maintain the integrity and sovereignty of RAFAEL as the supreme policy body in the area of defense R&D, were endorsed. Some aspects of Dinstein’s “economic thinking” were accepted as well, stating that for IDF projects the IDF sponsoring body should also fund the project. Other issues were postponed pending further study by the new Office of the Chief Scientist, to be reestablished at the Ministry of Defense under Ephraim Katzir and his deputy, Colonel Amos Horev. RAFAEL did not have to lay off a third of its manpower, as had originally been proposed. On the second issue, the bureaucratic fate of the “leading interdisciplinary project”—the nuclear project—Mardor had to accept Eshkol’s and Dinstein’s determination that final technical and financial coordination and oversight of the project must be transferred to the new independent scientific administration, though the original demand to transfer immediately those key technical staff units from RAFAEL to the new administration was delayed. Executive responsibility for completing the development phase would temporarily remain with RAFAEL.³⁶

The Israeli public knew almost nothing about this power struggle. On 1 April 1966 it was announced that Bergmann had resigned from his three posts at the Ministry of Defense, effective 1 May. It was acknowledged that the resignation was related to the major reorganization effort under way at the Ministry of Defense, and that a new administration would be installed to coordinate the national nuclear activities. In subsequent interviews, Bergmann referred to differences on matters of national science policy between him and the prime minister, on which he was overruled. He was vague and circumspect about speculations in the press that his resignation was tied to policy differences with Eshkol relating to nuclear development. Bergmann and Eshkol did not spell out in public what the policy differences were, though Bergmann laconically suggested that the Eshkol government was less sympathetic to “long-term scientific planning” than the Ben Gurion government had been.³⁷

This was only part of the truth. It was easier for Bergmann to present his forced resignation as having been caused by fundamental policy differences with Eshkol. There were differences, but Bergmann did not enjoy the trust and respect of the prime minister any longer. He was actively involved in the 1965 RAFI campaign, which violated the civil-service code. Beyond personal loyalties, Bergmann in 1966 was no longer a contributor to the R&D system that he had helped found fifteen years earlier. Both the Office of the Chief Scientist and the IAEC needed an overhaul, and it was clear that Bergmann had to go. His resignation appeared to be part of the central policy issue to the uninformed public, but it was only a sideshow. The real drama took place elsewhere, between Mardor and Dinstein.

Eshkol accepted Bergmann’s resignation, decorated him with the highest Israeli award for his contributions to the nation’s security, and nominated himself, in his capacity as prime minister, to be the new chair of the IAEC, with Israel Dostrovsky as its director-general, transferring the ministerial responsibility for the IAEC from the Ministry of Defense to the prime minister’s office. Because the general public knew nothing about the details of the power struggle and the personalities involved, it was easy to suggest in the press that Bergmann’s resignation concerned major policy differences with the Eshkol government about nuclear development.³⁸ Peres, who was informed by Mardor on the talks between Eshkol, Dinstein, and Mardor, kept his promise to Mardor not to politicize the issue as long as Mardor could live with the compromise.³⁹

Among the questions to be answered was whether the nuclear infrastructure under construction should be an emergency option or whether Israel should actually build nuclear weapons? Should Israel be the first to nuclearize the Middle East or should it keep itself just a step ahead of the Arabs? Should Israel reorient the IDF toward a nuclear strategy? Similar questions were reportedly raised and discussed earlier (see chapter 8), but the nuclear question then was only postponed, not resolved.

In 1966, however, some policy decisions had to be made, by action or by default. The technological, political, and strategic situation in 1966 was different from that in the early 1960s. These differences required the Eshkol government to formulate a strategic rationale for the nuclear project. It was at this time that the formula, “Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” became Israel’s declaratory policy, and that Eshkol’s policy of nuclear ambiguity emerged.

In 1966 the physical infrastructure of the project was completed or about to be completed, including the capability to produce weapon-grade fissile material, weapon design, and the testing of delivery means. According to Pierre Péan, “the first plutonium extraction tests took place during the second half of 1965,” and by 1966 Israel had enough plutonium to “manufacture the bomb during 1966, or at the latest early 1967.”⁴⁰ If the capability to separate plutonium is a primary measure of nuclear weapons capability, then, according to Péan, Israel reached that point around 1966.

Another measure of nuclear weapons capability is knowledge of weapon design. After Mardor details the 1966 struggle for the survival of RAFAEL, particularly maintaining control over that “leading project” whose development “almost reached completion,” he writes:

According to this interpretation, the test to which Mardor referred as something for which he had been waiting “for many years,” was a test of those aspects of the nuclear device that were under the responsibility of RAFAEL (perhaps a test of an entire implosion device, or a zero or near-zero yield test).⁴² Regardless of what was actually tested, weeks later the CIA disseminated new intelligence reports suggesting that Israel continued to produce bomb components, and that “assembly of a nuclear weapon could be completed in 6–8 weeks.”⁴³ The American reports highlight Mardor’s struggle to maintain the integrity of RAFAEL, especially the integrity of the almost-completed “leading project.” By late 1966 Israel had completed the development and testing of all the components of its first nuclear device. This is not, however, equal to possessing a complete nuclear weapon, which needs to be tested in order to be of operational value.

Another element in a nuclear weapons system is the warhead’s delivery means—a plane or a surface-to-surface missile. According to French sources, in April 1963 the Israeli Ministry of Defense signed a contract for ballistic missiles with the French manufacturer Marcel Dassault. The contract was for the development of a two-stage, solid propellant ballistic missile capable of carrying a 750-kg warhead. The missile project, known as MD-620, or Jericho, conducted its fire testing in 1965. The first two-stage launch, on 23 December 1965, failed, but the second one, in March 1966, succeeded.⁴⁴ In early 1966 the New York Times reported that Israel had purchased the first installment of thirty such missiles from France, and that they were under development.⁴⁵ By the time Israel had completed the design work for its first nuclear device, it was still lacking a dedicated delivery system.

By 1966 Israel had thus obtained, or was about to obtain, the three components that constitute a nuclear weapons capability: fissile material production capacity, design knowledge, and access to delivery means. This was as significant as the political developments. In October 1963 Eshkol’s inner circle included Peres, Dayan, Meir, Eban, and Chief of Staff Zur. In 1966 Eshkol’s inner circle had drastically changed, counting Eban, Galili, Allon, Dinstein, and Chief of Staff Rabin as members. These two groups had different ideologies and worldviews. The new members of Eshkol’s close circle of advisers supported a strong conventional IDF and were interested in promoting a U.S.-Israeli security dialogue.

There was also a change in the security relations between the United States and Israel: American military supplies became available to Israel for the first time. Ben Gurion had hoped for this for years, but it was under Eshkol that the United States began to supply Israel with tanks and planes. This was part of the tacit Johnson-Eshkol quid pro quo, that is, American arms to Israel for an Israeli commitment not to introduce nuclear weapons into the region. The “Eshkol-Komer Memorandum of Understanding” of March 1965 sealed this tacit agreement and made it more formal than before (see chapter 11). This memorandum, negotiated and signed when Peres was still Eshkol’s deputy, was the first official joint document in which this formula appears.

Another year passed before Eshkol would use this nonintroduction formula publicly for political purposes. In the first half of 1966, following a flurry of rumors in the world press about Israeli advances in its nuclear program, Nasser threatened a “preventive war” against Israel (see chapter 13). Fearing that the Arab’s perceptions of Israeli nuclear development might lead to war, Eshkol used the formula to defuse Arab concerns. In an address to the Knesset on 18 May 1966, Eshkol referred to the nuclear issue at great length. Replying to Nasser’s threats of preventive war against Israel were it to produce nuclear weapons, Eshkol gave a weapon-by-weapon tally of how Egypt had escalated the qualitative and quantitative arms race in the Middle East during the last fifteen years. Every new class of weapons system, he detailed, was introduced first by Egypt. It was also Egypt that first used chemical weapons in Yemen. In direct response to Nasser’s assertion that Egypt was pushed into the development of nuclear weapons because Israel already had done so, Eshkol said:

At the same time Eshkol raised some ideas on disarmament and regional arms control. He urged the big powers to draw the line between “the permissible and the impermissible” in establishing a balance of arms in the Middle East. He suggested that the idea of regional limitations on conventional armaments should be explored. “Until general disarmament is attained and the arms race is completely halted, a balance must be ensured by means of reciprocal supervision of agreed arrangements by the states of the region.”⁴⁷

Two new factors emerged concerning the nuclear issue in Eshkol’s address. First, the prime minister publicly pledged that Israel would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Eshkol had used this formula in public at least once before in response to a reporter’s question,⁴⁸ but this time it carried the weight of a national commitment. Eshkol deliberately used the somewhat ambiguous verb “introduce” (as opposed to “develop” or “manufacture”), but he made it clear that Israel did not have such weapons, and that to make them would be against its interest. Second, Eshkol’s address was the first to place the nuclear issue in its proper context, that of security and arms control. In particular, Eshkol identified the Arab’s superiority in conventional arms as the real problem, implying that Israeli nuclear development was a derivative of asymmetry in the conventional field.

The differences between Ben Gurion’s and Eshkol’s declaratory stance were important. Ben Gurion, in December 1960, stated that the Dimona reactor was devoted to “peaceful purposes,” directed at using atomic energy in industry, agriculture, and science. He denied that Israel had nuclear weapons and was careful not to make future policy commitments. Eshkol, who also denied that Israel had nuclear weapons, made a commitment that “Israel will not be the first state to introduce nuclear weapons into the region.” Eshkol, however, no longer talked about Dimona’s contribution to industry, agriculture, and science, and, after 1965, no longer used Ben Gurion’s references to its “peaceful purposes.” Nor did he deny the rumors and speculations in the world press regarding Israel’s nuclear capability.

This verbal formula is commonly attributed to Eshkol as its originator, but this is not the case. As documented in chapter 7, Peres is right to claim that he coined it first. In his 2 April 1963 meeting with Kennedy he used a variation on this formula.⁴⁹ Later Peres acknowledged that he used the wording without clearing it with anyone, “to get off Kennedy’s probing, I tried to say something [positive] without lying.” Certainly his answer was not an agreed-on policy. After his return to Israel, Peres recalls, Eshkol criticized him for using this wording.⁵⁰ Although Peres may have been the first to use it, Eshkol was the first to make it Israel’s declaratory policy. The formula was discussed by Eshkol’s advisers, notably Ya’acov Herzog, during preparations for his first official visit to the United States in June 1964.⁵¹ By that time, as the Dimona reactor was operational and Americans were allowed to visit it, Ben Gurion’s statement of December 1960 needed updating.

By pledging “not to be the first,” Eshkol gave Johnson a commitment to the principle of nonproliferation, but without committing himself to anything in the area of research and development. In 1964 Eshkol started using it informally; in 1965 it was sealed in the Eshkol-Komer secret “Memorandum of Understanding,” and in 1966 Eshkol publicly presented it as Israel’s policy. According to Dinstein, Eshkol was at first uncomfortable with the formula, but soon “he fell in love with it.”⁵²

Ironically, in those three years, 1963–66, Eshkol and Peres reversed their roles on this formula. In 1963, according to Peres, Eshkol criticized him for telling Kennedy that Israel would not be the first. In 1966 it was Peres as an opposition leader that criticized Eshkol in the Knesset for publicly using this formula, saying: “It is one thing to reassure friends [i.e., the United States] privately, it is another thing to reassure Nasser in the Knesset.”⁵³

Until about 1966 there was little systematic effort to define the political and strategic objectives of the nuclear project. To the extent that such thinking did take place, it was left to individuals at the Ministry of Defense who prepared papers for Peres and to the developers themselves, who needed to make certain strategic assumptions about the objectives of the project. Strategic ambiguity also prevailed among the project’s developers because the lack of political and strategic guidance was the norm. “Virtually in all the R&D projects with political significance the highest political level tended to avoid giving political guidance concerning technical specifications of the project.”⁵⁴ Because the political officials were reluctant to provide clear guidance involving the political aspects of the project, the developing establishment itself, sometimes in consultation with individuals from the outside, had to decide on its own how to translate the complex strategic concepts into the technical specifications of the products it was authorized to develop. “We brought the information [about specification options] to the attention of the highest political level, but it often chose not to respond.”⁵⁵ Left alone to make its own technical decisions, the nuclear development establishment could only assume that it properly understood the strategic intentions of the policy makers, but this may not necessarily have been true. Since the highest political level showed no interest in providing guidance, strategy was made from the bottom up.

The organizational changes that Eshkol and Dinstein introduced into the R&D system in 1966 were accompanied by the development of concepts and strategy at the national level. Eshkol, Dinstein, and Rabin asked a few individuals, among them Yuval Ne’eman, Colonel Avraham (Abrasha) Tamir, and Shalheveth Freier to elucidate Israeli strategic thinking in this area. What Eshkol called the “Samson Option” and Peres described as an “option for a rainy day” became, in these early discussions, the foundation of an original and well-thought-out Israeli rationale for the mission of its nuclear option.⁵⁶ It was also during this period that the two functions of the Israeli nuclear program as a national insurance policy were proposed and articulated.⁵⁷

These were two distinct ideas about the role of the nuclear program. In the first case, the specter of Israeli nuclear weapons serves as insurance vis-à-vis the United States, a strong political incentive for America to keep Israel conventionally armed, believing that a sufficiently armed Israel would not have to use its nuclear option. This was not among the primary rationales that had led Ben Gurion to the nuclear project, but, under Eshkol, the insurance component became a central aspect of Israel’s national security strategy. This component proved successful, perhaps the single most important cause for the change in the U.S security commitment to Israel.

The nuclear program was also meant as a tool of “last resort” in extreme military and political contingencies. One such case has to do with the possibility that if an Arab state were thought to have produced or purchased a nuclear device of its own, Israel must always be in a position to meet such a threat, especially under rapidly deteriorating political circumstances. Soon after Eshkol came up with the formula “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” Yigal Allon highlighted this point by adding the caveat that Israel would not be the second country either. Unlike the United States in the Second World War, which feared that Germany was developing its own nuclear weapons, fear of an Arab nuclear capability was not among the original reasons that caused Ben Gurion to initiate the nuclear project. For the Eshkol government, however, the possibility of nuclear weapons in the hands of the Arab states served as a double reminder: first, that nuclearization of the region is against the Israeli national interest; second, that Israel must prudently prepare itself for such a contingency.

Another type of last-resort scenario that haunted those responsible for Israeli security was the possibility of the formation of a pan-Arab war coalition against Israel. Arab rhetoric about the “destruction of the Zionist entity” or “pushing Israel into the sea,” defined Israel’s worst-case scenario. This fear was the original motive for Ben Gurion to pursue nuclear weapons, and it has remained the strongest incentive for Israel to maintain its nuclear weapons program.

Most political and military leaders did not share Ben Gurion’s pessimism in the late 1950s and early 1960s, or Dayan’s gloomy conclusions that in the long run Israel would not be able to keep up with the conventional arms race. They did not dispute, however, the notion that Israel must prepare itself for the worst-case scenario—a swift and dramatic deterioration of Israel’s basic security. The idea of the nuclear weapons program as a safety net has enjoyed almost total national consensus in Israel.

Around 1966 the Israeli defense establishment for the first time began systematic long-term strategic planning: five-year plans for force-structure and a ten-year plan for R&D. The original Ben-Gurion rationale for acquiring nuclear weapons was conceptualized and defined during these discussions in terms of having an option of “last resort.” They also produced the early articulation of “red lines” whose crossing could trigger the use of nuclear weapons. There were four specific scenarios that could lead to nuclear use: (a) a successful Arab military penetration into populated areas within Israel’s post-1949 borders; (b) the destruction of the Israeli Air Force; (c) the exposure of Israeli cities to massive and devastating air attacks or to possible chemical or biological attacks; (d) the use of nuclear weapons against Israeli territory. Each of these scenarios was defined, in qualitative terms, as an existential threat to the State of Israel against which the nation could defend itself by no other means than the use of atomic weapons, which would be politically and morally justified. Furthermore, some emphasized, if Israel were to develop a nuclear capability, it must develop the kind of weapon that could be used over its own territory.⁵⁸

There was, however, a strategic counterargument. It was pointed out that any attempt to think of a last-resort nuclear employment in the context of Israel’s pre-1967 borders poses a difficult question. To use a nuclear bomb in moments of true last resort, say, when a massive Arab army had already breached the borders of Israel, may be too late, and thus militarily unacceptable. To use nuclear weapons in a preemption of Arab armies, however, would be too early, and therefore politically unacceptable. Israeli strategists discovered the problem with which NATO planners had been struggling throughout the cold war: when is the right moment for nuclear weapons to be used to stop a conventionally superior enemy attack?⁵⁹

One realization that came out in the discussions was that it would be inconceivable for a state like Israel to resort to nuclear weapons in the heat of war without warning. If a state decided to maintain a nuclear-weapons option, its enemies must know something about it, or at least be concerned that the nuclear capability existed. Deterrence works only if the deterrent capability is known and feared by one’s adversaries. Israel, however, committed itself not to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the region, and left its nuclear weapons capability ambiguous. How could a state deter if it did not acknowledge that it was in possession of nuclear weapons?

In responding to this problem, Israeli strategists suggested thinking about deterrence and ambiguity in a dynamic way. One may think about deterrence in terms of a spectrum, in which the uncertain end is represented by rumors and speculations, and the other end is represented by full-yield testing and declaration. Israel’s nuclear deterrence should rest on the presumption—to be encouraged by sporadic rumors and leaks—that it had a nuclear weapons capability and that, under certain conditions of extreme threat, it might be compelled to use it.

It was understood that leaks and rumors, as long as they were not attributed to identifiable sources, would be in Israel’s interest. In case of an actual emergency Israel must be ready to move quickly along the deterrence spectrum. To be able to emphasize the element of nuclear deterrence in a moment of need—during a crisis or even at the outbreak of hostilities—Israel should develop the technical means to demonstrate its nuclear weapons capability on very short notice. These strategic ideas were natural as the project’s developers tried to make strategic sense of the notion of an ambiguous and uncertain nuclear deterrence. The political echelon played almost no role in providing guidance to the developers in these discussions. This situation would change somewhat in 1966, when Eshkol reformed the R&D structure, but even these reforms were more about personalities, bureaucratic politics, and economic and financial control than matters of strategic guidance and political oversight.⁶⁰

There was, however, one issue—testing—on which political echelon’s guidance was clear. Despite pleas from the project’s top leaders that a full test was needed to complete the development stage, Eshkol refused to consider it, or even a “peaceful” nuclear explosion.⁶¹ No matter how much the project’s leaders wanted it, they continued to be overruled. Even so, Eshkol allowed the project’s leaders to explore the technical side of a nuclear test (apparently such guidance had been given early in the Ben Gurion period, while Eshkol did not challenge it).⁶²

It must be stressed that these arguments and counterarguments, to the limited extent they were known to the senior Israeli military establishment in the mid 1960s, were viewed as theoretical and irrelevant to the IDF’s mission. Rabin’s generals did not believe in any of these gloomy scenarios, which they viewed as utterly unrealistic.⁶³ These military men were committed to the notion that the IDF mission was to prevent such scenarios from coming to pass. To accomplish this mission Israel must have a strong tactical air force capable of destroying all Arab aircraft on the ground (the Moked Plan) and a massive armored force. The meaning of “last resort” was that the military had failed in its mission to defend Israel.

This attitude was also shared by Ne’eman and Tamir who, each under a different institutional arrangement, were asked to elucidate an Israeli nuclear-weapons option. They were in favor of maintaining a national nuclear weapons infrastructure that could materialize quickly if the need arose, but they opposed basing Israel’s national security on an open nuclear deterrence posture.⁶⁴

As noted earlier (in interpreting Mardor’s text), in late 1966 RAFAEL had successfully completed its role in developing the first nuclear explosive device. On 14 December 1966 there was a critical accident in Dimona that caused the death of one employee, forcing operations at the site to stop for almost three months.⁶⁵ The accident and its consequences shocked the people in charge of the nuclear project. Dimona was reopened in February. On that occasion Eshkol paid a visit to Dimona, a visit that was even reported in the Israeli press.⁶⁶

Eshkol’s February 1967 visit to Dimona signified, in a sense, the completion of his commitment to the development stage of the project. It appears, however, that the completion of this stage, the effects of the accident, as well as Nasser’s threats of “preventive war” and renewed American pressure created an opportunity for Eshkol to rethink his nuclear policy: How far should Israel go in pursuing the nuclear project once it has completed the developmental stage? Should Israel maintain or change its policy? Ambassador Walworth Barbour, in his conversations with Eshkol and Eban in late 1966 and early 1967, detected this “lessening in determination to keep Nasser in the dark” with regard to the nuclear project.⁶⁷

It was under Eshkol that Ben Gurion’s dream of an Israeli nuclear option became a reality. On the eve of the 1967 war all the components of Israel’s nuclear weapons were in place. The challenges that the newly reorganized IAEC, under Eshkol’s chairmanship, faced were generally matters of integration and coordination of the various components constituting the nuclear weapons capability. Since 1963 Eshkol had overhauled and completed the technological infrastructure of the project; he opened options for a future nuclear policy; and he placed the project in its proper place in Israel’s strategic thinking. Yet, like Ben Gurion before him, in 1966–67 Eshkol was not ready to make decisive long-term decisions on the nuclear issue.

Eshkol was as committed as Ben Gurion to the principle that Israel must have a nuclear weapons program. He was also committed to the principle that financial and strategic priorities must be given to Israel’s needs in the conventional field. The IDF must be built and trained so that Israel could defeat its enemies conventionally. The nuclear-weapons option must remain a national insurance policy for an unthinkable eventuality, for a rainy day. Under Eshkol, the strategic objective of the nuclear-weapons option was not to deter the Arabs but to maintain a bargaining chip vis-à-vis the United States and a last-resort nuclear capability.

Eshkol’s policies had another implication. No matter how far Israel advanced in the nuclear field, it must not openly be seen as fully acquiring nuclear weapons by testing, declaration, or any other activity which might imply that Israel was moving toward acquiring nuclear weapons and adopting a nuclear strategy. This was the meaning of Eshkol’s commitment that Israel would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. Eshkol deliberately did not state publicly anything about development, though he did say, in his 1966 Knesset address, that Israel did not possess nuclear weapons and did not want to nuclearize the Arab-Israeli conflict. This was the essence of Eshkol’s nuclear strategy in the period before 1967.

Another important domestic aspect of Eshkol’s legacy deals with political civilian control. Given the sensitivity of the nuclear project, Eshkol understood that the highest elected official in the land must have firm control over all the nation’s nuclear weapons activities. After years during which the IAEC did not function properly, Eshkol reorganized and revitalized the IAEC under his chairmanship and the executive directorship of Dostrovsky as the supervisory and coordinating organ of all aspects of nuclear weapons activities. Eshkol ended the divide-and-rule system by which Peres had managed the nuclear project; he removed Bergmann and Pratt; and, in the face of intense pressure, he modified Mardor’s responsibilities. With help from Dinstein, Dostrovsky, Tulipman, Ne’eman, de Shalit, and Freier, Eshkol revamped the nuclear bureaucracy he inherited and declared himself its new boss. These were not small accomplishments for a man who had limited knowledge of nuclear affairs only three years earlier. Eshkol determined the fundamentals of centralized political control over the nation’s most secret activities.

Some have suggested that Eshkol’s nuclear weapons policy was shaped by his political alliance with the proconventional military thinkers such as Galili and Allon. It is even claimed that under the influence of Galili and Allon, Eshkol slowed down the pace of the nuclear weapons program.⁶⁸ This is misleading. More than Galili’s and Allon’s conventional military doctrine, Eshkol’s views were shaped by his senior military advisers, particularly Generals Yitzhak Rabin, Ezer Weizman, Chaim Barlev, Aharon Yariv, and Israel Tal. In 1963–66 these military leaders demanded both longer range tanks (M-48, M-60) and planes (Mirage V, A-4, F-4).⁶⁹ They disagreed with one another over the relative importance of each, but they all agreed that Israel should not defy the United States and adopt a strategy based on nuclear deterrence. At the time most generals had only vague knowledge of the state of development of the nuclear project, and almost none were familiar with issues of nuclear strategy.

Eshkol knew that sophisticated conventional weapons from the United States were what his military leaders wanted. A working compromise with the United States on the nuclear weapons issue, which respected American interests and brought tanks and airplanes to Israel without compromising the basic commitment to the nuclear weapons project, was endorsed by both the army and political leaders. Getting sophisticated arms from America in return for a politically ambiguous nuclear pledge, at the small cost of U.S. visits to Dimona, was, for Eshkol, not a concession but a diplomatic achievement.

In reflecting on the relative roles of Ben Gurion and Eshkol, one is struck by the historical irony. Ben Gurion’s resolve made the nuclear weapons project possible. The idea of creating long-term stable deterrence for Israel by relying on nuclear weapons was his vision. His caution on the nuclear question, however, undermined his resolve for Israel to acquire nuclear weapons. Ben Gurion managed the politics of the Dimona project, particularly vis-à-vis the United States, in a way that made it difficult to convert it into a vehicle of long-term deterrence for Israel. Because of his caution, Ben Gurion decided, in December 1960, to deny the significance of the Dimona reactor to Israel’s security, and later, in 1961 and 1963, to allow U.S. visits to Dimona. The political message of the visits was that Israel was not developing a military nuclear option. Ben Gurion resigned as he and Kennedy came to a showdown on the matter of the Dimona project. The project’s founder was unable to find the proper balance between resolve and caution. He left office with a nearly finished physical infrastructure, but with no coherent sense of mission or policy.

That difficult task was left to the inexperienced Eshkol. He inherited the project at its most vulnerable moment, when Kennedy, based on previous commitments from Ben Gurion, brought the question of Israel’s nuclear development to the fore. Eshkol skillfully avoided a clash with the United States, closely followed Ben Gurion’s path, and still did not create a long-term policy. Yet his resolution of the crisis opened the door for a new U.S.-Israeli security dialogue. Israel was no longer asking for formal security guarantees from the United States; instead, it was asking for arms and a political commitment.

Eshkol was a good custodian of his nation’s security interests. He was the first Israeli prime minister to acquire American military hardware. He formed firm, if tacit, understandings with the United States, for which Israel pledged it would not introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. In the meantime, Eshkol did not compromise Israel’s commitment to a last-resort nuclear weapons capability. He did follow Ben Gurion on the matter of the American visits, but took care that those visits would not compromise Israel’s plans.