TJS S3E19: The Samson Option

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And yet, says survivor and poet Itamar Yoaz Kest, there is a right reserved only to us Jews, if indeed any human on earth has this right, to be destroyed and to take the weary and sated world with us to the non-existence. Now lest you think that that's where I'm leading you, on the contrary, I'm trying to craft a narrative that can get us through the other side. Because I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. Episode 19, The Samson Option. You know, much of what I know about human behavior, I learned in two years of my life. For two years, I lived in the woods with at-risk youth in a wilderness therapy program. I like to call it hoods in the woods. We had kids from some of the hardest walks of life adjudicated.

They were sent there by the courts. And as we used to say, you can sign yourself in, but you don't get to sign yourself out. They were 12 to 16. some of them hulking teenagers, other ones the standard pimply types. But every once in a while, we would get into the group a really tiny kid. And I got to tell you, it was a bit of a jungle out there at times. To say that the power dynamic was hierarchical is a gross understatement. In a world in which might makes right, or at the very least, might rules, you'd think that the little kid was always at a disadvantage. So I was always looking out for them, until I discovered that, in fact, there is another dynamic at hand. And that's what I like to think of as the theory of the crazy little guy.

We got a kid in our group once. We'll call him Marcus, for lack of a better word. He couldn't have been much more than four feet tall, probably weighed all of 80 pounds, soaking wet. And yet he radiated a kind of crazy energy that instinctively made everyone back off. As I decided that I needed to get to the bottom of this mystery, I poked around a little bit, asked some questions, listened, and I discovered that all of my guys, all of my boys, had something that I call that theory of crazy little guys, which is very simple. It's like this. If you're little in that dog-eat-dog world out there, you're obviously at quite a disadvantage. So how do you take care of it? Well, here's how you do it. The first time anybody crosses you, no matter what it was, whether it's a punch in the face, a trip in the hole, a knocking your books off your desk, you simply go ballistic, freak out, bite ears, break glasses, kick, scream, punch to the point where you have to be physically restrained.

And you see, once you do that two or three times, there's no sliding scale of reaction. Anything which is done, anybody who crosses you in any way gets the same reaction. Well, everybody learns to just back off. I mean, it's not worth it. Why provoke the madness when you're just looking for a little bit of fun? And that theory of crazy little guys actually taught me a very important lesson about management, particularly in that environment, which is that if people are not entirely certain what you might do next, they're quite hesitant to cross you in any real way. You know, somewhere back in the 50s, General Moshe Dayan, when he was the minister of fence, said Israel must be seen as a mad dog, too dangerous to bother.

And that kind of lies at the heart of the story that I want to tell today, because what we're talking about today is the Samson option, This idea that Israel is in fact a nuclear power. I know we're going to lay out the details of how we got there and the question of why it's a question, but for now I just want you to hold the sense of psychology that lies behind. It's that a people who had suffered powerlessness and tremendous torture for 2,000 years suddenly comes through the furnaces of Europe and finds themselves back in their land with enormous power at hand but surrounded by tremendous enemies. and their primary posture is one of mad aggression. Israel must be seen as a mad dog, he said, too dangerous to bother.

And suddenly, we find ourselves in a world in which there's two types of sticks. There's the average and then there's the truly big one. Well, which one do you think that we're going to reach for? On July 16, 1945, at 5.29 a.m., the world changed forever. The Trinity test was the detonation of the first atomic bomb, and in fact a dry run, so to speak, for the devastation that would strike Hiroshima and Nagasaki less than a month later. And J. Robert Oppenheimer later recalled his reaction as he watched the success of his life's work rise in a mushroom cloud billowing up into the atmosphere. It's a quote. We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most were silent.

I remember the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty. And to impress him, takes on his multi-armed form and says, Now I am become death. Destroyer. of the worlds. In October of 1945, only a couple months after the bombing of Japan, Oppenheimer met with Harry Truman. He was aiming to persuade the president to support international controls on nuclear weapons, which he now realized were beyond the capacity of what he'd ever dreamed or even had nightmares about, and he was deeply fearful of what he saw to be their inevitable spread. Truman was downright dismissive, claiming that the Russians, who at that point were already seen as the pressing threat to all American interests, would never succeed in developing nuclear weapons.

Oppenheimer pleaded with the President, saying, Mr. President, I feel I have blood on my hands. But Truman cut the meeting short. He would later label Oppenheimer as a crybaby scientist in order his Secretary of State never to, quote, bring that son of a bitch in his office ever again. But what the President didn't understand was that Oppenheimer's tears were not so much for the wartime deaths of the Japanese, which Truman wanted to dismiss. They were over the deaths of untold millions he saw dying in some future apocalypse. Because truth of the matter, Truman couldn't have been more wrong. Once the atomic genie was out of the bottle, it was just a matter of time until it spread. In fact, its spread had actually begun before the war ended, because the Americans may have taken the lead in the technological race, but the awareness of the power and potential of nuclear weapons was no secret, and that meant that there were other countries not so far behind.

The Soviet Union began its research early in the war, and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki only added fuel to their fire. By hook or by crook, they were determined not to be left behind. And by 1949, only four years later, they'd made their first nuclear test. We actually saw a bit of the sort of Jewish crossover in the story of the Russian bomb through the Rosenberg spy story. If you remember, you can go back to Season 3, Episode 10 for the details. But the story of the Israeli bomb is not connected to the Soviet program, and it's only marginally related to the American bomb, actually. In 1944, before the war's end, in the French embassy in Ottawa, a meeting took place between General Charles de Gaulle and nuclear scientists Jules Girard and Bertrand Goldschmidt.

At the end of that meeting, de Gaulle turned to Goldschmidt and he said, thank you, now I understand exactly. And what de Gaulle understood was that once the bomb existed, there would be a new hierarchy in the international world, those who had the bomb and everyone else. Or, as he'd write later in his World War II memoirs, France cannot be France without greatness. Now in Israel, it was Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, a great admirer of de Gaulle, who was actually the first to appreciate the reality of this coming new world order. And of course, he wasn't after greatness. And this is a man who wore open college shirts and baggy pants and died, if not in poverty, certainly far from wealthy. No, no. Ben-Gurion's aim wasn't greatness.

It was life insurance. And it wasn't personal. It was national. Because as all of Ben-Gurion's close aides knew, his private nightmare in the early years of the state was of a second holocaust. and this time at the hands of the Arabs. It's a shadow that won't go away because if you read the news, we have a prime minister right now who, perhaps rightly, fears a third holocaust at the hands of a Persian nuclear bomb. So Ben-Gurion was persuaded that as long as the Arabs thought that they could destroy the Jewish state, there would be no peace and no recognition of Israel. Ironically, it was an extension of his old enemy, Zev Jabotinsky's concept of the Iron Wall. Once we learn to stand firm, then peace will come.

But so long as there's a scent of blood in the water, it will never be. And along with many other Israelis, both in leadership level and the rank and file of the country, Ben-Gurion's mantra became Ein Bre'ger. There is no alternative. Since our backs are to the wall and we're surrounded by implacable enemies, there's no choice but to be ready at all times to strike the first and decisive blow. or, even better, like Moshe Dayan said, to be seen as a mad dog too dangerous to mess with. Because reality is, there may not be this chance for a second round. To this very day, Israeli national security strategy is founded on the premise that Israel cannot afford to lose a single war. Even a battle is seen as a disaster.

And of course, the best way to never lose a war is not to fight it in the first place. And that's why deterrence is essential to national security. If that deterrence should fail, God forbid, since we have no strategic depth to speak of, that outcome of the war has to be determined quickly, decisively, and preferably on the territory of our enemies. And I'm sure when you put those pieces together, you can understand how nuclear weapons are the perfect fulfillment of that national security strategy. Now, it's well known that along with this sense of Ain Brayra, of no choice, The Prime Minister had a second principle that guided his defense doctrine. Israel is a tiny country, and he saw that it could only survive in the hostile world with a great power patron.

And as we saw back earlier in this episode, in the 1950s, that great power was France. Now, what's interesting is that despite their status as an allied nation in the fight against the Nazis, and their role as a founding member in the NATO alliance, the North American Treaty Organization, which stood against the Soviet Union post-World War II, the French nuclear ambitions received a downright cold shoulder from the United States Frankly the Americans viewed the French Atomic Energy Commission which was often under control of the French Communist Party as being riddled with Soviet agents. And so France was forced to pursue a policy of atomic independence if they wanted to realize De Gaulle's vision of greatness.

And they received absolutely no American help. No American help, but actually plenty of Israeli. Now you can blame us for all kinds of things, but you can't blame the Jewish people for bringing the atomic bomb into existence. That being said, you certainly can put it on the plate of a lot of Jews. But aside from the numerous Jewish scientists who filled out the ranks of the American Manhattan Project at their Los Alamos secret research center, the man considered to be the intellectual father of the idea of the bomb was Leo Silsard, a Hungarian Jewish refugee from Nazism who conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction in 1933. He went on to patent the idea of a nuclear reactor together with the physicist Enrico Fermi, who was not himself a Jew, but was nonetheless a refugee that had fled Mussolini's Italy in order to save his Jewish wife.

Add to this the German Jewish refugees Rudolf Pils, I'm sure I said that wrong, and Otto Frisch, who designed the first theoretical mechanism for the detonation of an atomic bomb in 1940. And of course, team director of the Manhattan Project was J. Robert Oppenheimer, a Jew born in New York City. Those are all the Jews involved in the American bomb. The scientific father of the Israeli bomb, its own Oppenheimer, as it were, was a skinny, pale-faced, chain-smoking organic chemist named Ernst David Bergman, who was also a refugee from Nazi Germany. Born in 1903, Bergman was introduced to the world of the atom early in the 20s as a student of organic chemistry at the University of Berlin. His discipline placed him just on the edge of what was rapidly becoming an international quest to unravel the mystery of nuclear fission.

In fact, not only was Bergman an organic chemist, he was a rabbi's son. His father was one of the leading rabbis of Berlin and also happened to be a close friend of Chaim Weitman, Russian Jewish biochemist, Zionist leader, and future first president of Israel. If you don't remember, go listen to the second half of season two. And Weizman resided in England during the interwar period. So when, in 1933, a series of Nazi degrees made it impossible for any non-Aryan, Bergman included, to have a job in academic world of Germany, Weizman arranged for the young chemist to join him on the faculty of Manchester University in England. and there Bergman continued his close association with the scientists racing to split the atom and he did it in the context of the experience of the rise of world fascism in 1936, only a few years later the Haganah, the underground army of the labor Zionist movement asked Weizmann for a chemist that could help them produce an effective high explosive for use in their struggle against the Arabs and the British See, dynamite was far too dangerous for them to be handling in their situation.

And Weizman assigned the mission to Bergman, whose success led him to signing on as a member of the Haganah's technical committee from there on out. Shortly after Germany invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, Bergman left England. And by 1940, he was running a laboratory at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. Two years later, he actually became dean of the faculty, and he managed to turn the institute into a haven for Jewish refugees, including Chaim Weizman himself. and, you know, one good turn deserving another, at the end of the war, Bergman followed his mentor up to pre-state Palestine and helped to establish what would become the Weizmann Institute of Science at Rehovot, just south of Tel Aviv.

And in those days, and frankly even now, Israeli ambitions for scientific development seemed unlimited. From the outset, the institute aimed to place Israel at the head of all world technology, and that included nuclear. As early as 1947, Weizmann was wooing Oppenheimer and his colleagues at the Manhattan Project invited them to spend time doing research in Israel. Very few took him up on it, by the way. It wasn't so easy for a nuclear scientist to just go somewhere else with their knowledge in those days. But truth is, the Weizmann Institute wasn't Bergman's final home. That would be the Ministry of Defense. At the request of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, Bergman established the nation's first Institute for Defense research immediately following independence in 1948.

In the beginning, his goal was purely scientific. But eventually, Bergman would work together with Ben-Gurion's protege, Shimon Peres, to create the Israeli nuclear option. But truth is, though that lay down the road, Peres would tell an Israeli newspaper later, much later in the 80s, that even in 1948, Bergman was constantly speaking about a missile capability for Israel. It seems that Bergman's life as a Jewish refugee had taught him that indeed, there is no choice. Israel would never be the biggest dog on the block, and therefore it had no choice but to be the meanest. In 1949, the commissioner of the French nuclear program, Francis Perrin, traveled to Tel Aviv. There, under circumstances which remain completely unclear, he met Ernst Bergman.

And maybe it was their shared experience as refugees, Perrin was a socialist who'd fled France when it fell to the Nazis in 1940, or maybe it was simply their mutual love of the atom, but the two become fast friends. And as a result, Israeli scientists were permitted to attend Saclay, which was a newly set up French National Atomic Research Center near Versailles. From the outset, Bergman's men were there to participate in the construction of Saclay's small experimental reactor. It was a learning experience for nuclear scientists of both countries and the beginning of a mutually beneficial relationship. Bergman told Ben-Gurion many times, there's only one atom, no matter how you split it. In other words, once you can produce plutonium as a byproduct of peaceful atomic research, you can use it in a bomb.

And that's why the turning point in the French nuclear program was also a turning point in the Israeli nuclear program. came in 1951 when France began the construction at Markul of a reactor capable of producing, after chemical reprocessing, about 22 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium a year. In 1952, Ben-Gurim named Ertz Bergman commissioner of Israel's new Atomic Energy Commission and he raced ahead with that French connection. By 1953, the Weizmann Institute had developed an improved mechanism for producing the heavy water that was needed for regulating atomic reactions as well as a more efficient method for mining the uranium that fed the reactor. They immediately sold both concepts to the French, and this led to a formal agreement for cooperation in nuclear research signed by the two nations.

In fact, Israeli scientists were the only foreigners that were allowed access to the secret French nuclear complex at Marcool, where they were said to be able to roam at will. And this wasn't just friendship. One reason for the depth of cooperation was purely pragmatic. The sheer brilliance of the Israelis and their expertise in the new computer technology made the French dependent upon them for the next decade in specific for their computer skills. The second one is a little bit more ambiguous and murky and it plays to the deeper and more complex side of this story. It was emotional. Because many of those French officials and scientists had served in the resistance. They held intense feeling about the Holocaust.

Even further, many of France's leading nuclear scientists were Jewish and strong supporters of the new Jewish state. Now, if you want, you can go back to episodes 14 and 15 to recall the impact that that practical and emotional bind had on Israel's conventional arms relationship with France. In the 50s, Israel was merging, to delight certainly of these French nuclear scientists, as France's closest ally in the Middle East. But the truth of the matter is, not everyone was so delighted with this French connection. There was significant skepticism about the bomb among a small subset of Israeli leaders. In fact, it was a very small group who even knew about this French connection. Some felt it was simply immoral for a people who had so recently experienced genocide to pursue weapons of mass destruction.

Some preferred to invest the limited resources Israel had in conventional weapons. Let us just be the strongest on the battlefield, they said. but others simply doubted Israel's technical capacity to ever split the atom, much less build a bomb. But for now, these remained largely theoretical concerns. In November of 1954, Ernst Bergman introduced himself to the citizens of Israel through a public radio address when he announced, only two years too late, that an Israeli Atomic Energy Commission had been established. and he was quick to assure the citizens of his fair country that Israel was making progress in peaceful nuclear research. And in fact, they were soon to sign an agreement with the United States under the Eisenhower administration's Atoms for Peace program.

They were doing a lot more to try to control the spread than Truman had done. It was a program for the cooperation in civilian uses of atomic energy. In general, it meant that Washington would help people develop peaceful uses for nuclear technology and try to head off the bomb at the pass. In specific, the agreement between the two of them meant that Washington would finance and fuel a small nuclear research reactor located in Ahl Sarik, south of Tel Aviv. I believe it's still there. In return for an Israeli guarantee that the nuclear materials would not be diverted into weapons research. And you know what? Technically, this was the truth. The American materials would never become a bomb. In 1955, soon after Ben-Green came back to power as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, he launched a secret initiative within his government to determine how Israel could build the infrastructure needed to develop a nuclear bomb.

It was a difficult task, and given to his young, only 32 years old at the time, and highly ambitious Lieutenant Shimon Peres, then the Director General of the Ministry of Defense. Within three years, Perez did what was considered impossible. He transformed the idea of a national nuclear program into an actual project in the making. Now unlike Ernst Bergman who was obsessed with the notion of self which bore a lot of fruit because he was not only the father of Israeli nuclear research he was also the father in many ways of Israel missile program Nevertheless, unlike Bergman, who preached self-reliance, Perez's overall perspective was Israel need not reinvent the wheel. His goal was to find a foreign supplier that could provide the most comprehensive nuclear package possible.

And in fact, for the first time ever, in 1955, Canada had sold nuclear technology to a third country and no one had blinked an eye. So in light of the ongoing research cooperation with France, as well as the arms deals being made, they were the obvious candidate. Like we saw in episodes 14 and 15, throughout the 50s, Shimon Peres established relationships with the highest echelon of French military and political leadership. And like I said, his success in acquiring conventional arms was well established. But what's lesser known is how the French failure of will in the Suez crisis led almost directly to the success of Israel's nuclear ambitions. It seems that even before the war broke out, it was clear to both Ben-Gurion and Perez that the French were going to be their source, and that Ben-Gurion, perhaps six weeks before the combat, had ordered Perez to get French assistance in building a nuclear reactor.

There are no records of their response, but I can imagine that they were a little bit hesitant. After all, it's a big step to go from Israelis cooperating on French technology to the French building the Israelis a reactor of their own, knowing full well where it was headed. But it seems that the debacle of the Suez campaign changed everything. Go back and listen to episode 15 for the details, But for now, just recall that the French and the British balked at following through not only on their promise to destroy Nasser, but also balked at supporting Israel in the post-war negotiations within the United Nations. And it was largely due to the American intervention. It was Eisenhower and his vision of shucking off the shackles of the old colonial world that really brought the hammer down on the British and the French.

Now, it's true that in the wake of that war, Israel gained a decade of breathing room, but it's also true that the president of Egypt, Nasser, emerged from the conflict stronger than ever and a bigger threat than perhaps they'd ever imagined he would be. And that outcome had a heavy influence on Israel's nuclear goal. First of all, it convinced many of the skeptics in Ben-Gurion's government that there was indeed, Aen B'Ala, there was no choice but to rely upon themselves. One former Israeli government official, when he was recalling his feelings at the time, put it this way, you Americans screwed us. If you hadn't intervened, Nasser would have been toppled and the arms race in the Middle East would have been delayed.

Israel would have kept its military and technological edge. We got the message. We can still remember the smell of Auschwitz and Treg Blinka. Next time, we'll take all of you with us. Now, in addition to bringing more of the government over to Ben-Gurion's no-choice worldview, the French failure at Suez opened the door to their direct assistance. French Premier Guy Mollet, obsessed, apparently, with the consequences of France's failure, was quoted as telling an aide at the time of his meetings with Perez, I owe the bomb to them. I owe the bomb to them. There were still many hurdles ahead, but essentially the deal was struck for a French-constructed Israeli nuclear reactor in the wake of that 56 Suez campaign.

And the French-Israeli agreement called for a plant with peak energy production of 24 megawatts, which was more or less the same size of the plant at Mercule. But when the engineers of the French chemical firm St. Gobain were actually given the plans, its specifications suggested that the plant would operate at two or three times that capacity, meaning it would produce more than 22 kilo of plutonium a year, enough for four nuclear bombs with the force of those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now, originally, Ben-Gurion and Perez had planned to hide the Israeli reactor in an old winery in Rishon Litsion, but as their dream became a reality, they realized that sight would never do. And so it wasn't difficult for Perez to convince Ben-Gurion to locate it at Dimona, near the ancient city of Beersheva, in the heart of his beloved Negev Desert.

Groundbreaking for the reactor took place in early 1958, and over the next few years, thousands of tons of imported machinery, hundreds of foreign technicians, engineers, spouses, children, turned that quiet corner of the Negev Desert, frankly, into a French boomtown. And now Ben-Gurin had only two challenges, how to pay for it all, and how to keep it secret. Abe Feinberg was the epitome of the American Jewish dream. Born in 1908 in New York City to a hard-working, not poor, but not well-off family, He paid his own way up through high school and college, working in the garment industry. Abe went on to pursue a law degree at NYU, eventually rising to become chairman of New York-based apparel manufacturer Kaiser Roth, and then ultimately chairman of the American Bank and Trust Company.

He did quite well for himself. With the rise of Hitler in 1933, even though he was only 25 at the time, Abe became a major force in the United Palestine Appeal, which eventually became the United Jewish Appeal, the UJA, raising money to help bring Jews out of Europe and to get them into Israel. Now, from here, it was a rather easy move into bankrolling democratic politics. He became legendary amongst political funders for success in raising a critical $100,000 for the 1948 whistle-stop tour that brought Truman to the presidency. In fact, later, some would say that he had made Truman president. Over the next couple of decades, Feinberg would go on to become one of the most important and influential Jewish voices in democratic politics, which is why I said he really represents that American Jewish dream.

We're surely going to meet him again when our focus goes back to America. But his role in our story actually begins in 1945, when a group of 17 wealthy Jewish businessmen gathered in the New York apartment of millionaire Rudolf Sonborn. They were there to meet, not yet Prime Minister, but nevertheless, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, in response to his appeal for money to arm the pre-state underground. And their response was to form what was known as the Sonborn Institute. It was a millionaire boys club, which contributed hundreds of thousands of dollars toward buying and stockpiling military materials, which eventually helped the young state of Israel win the war. In the eyes of Ben-Gurion, he would later say that this was the foundation of the Israeli military industry and was one of the three greatest accomplishments in his life, second only to making Aliyah to the land of Israel and declaring the state.

Abe Feinberg was the youngest member of the Sonborn Institute, and he also happened to be a friend of Ernst Bergman. Now, Bergman visited New York in the fall of 1947, and whenever he was there, he was fond of joining the Feinberg family for services on Friday night and dinner afterwards. And though the scientist was notoriously tight-lipped about his nuclear vision, for some reason he must have felt at home in Feinberg's house, and he couldn't resist hinting to his host. Later, when Feinberg told the story, he recalled, quote, Bergman's eyes lit up and he said, there is uranium in the desert. There was no question about the message. The path was now cleared for Israel to develop the atomic bomb. Astonished at such indiscreet talk, I shushed him up.

Despite that shushing, the seed of the idea was planted. And that's why Abe Feinberg was far from surprised when Ben-Gurion turned to him once again to employ the Sonnenfeld Foundation method to privately fund the next phase of Israel's military development, the nuclear option. Now, battles over the financial wisdom or even feasibility of a nuclear program were a constant reality for Ben Gurin. I could probably write a whole book at this point with the research I've done about the impact of the program on the development of conventional weapons, not to mention the brain drain that it created on Israel's general technical capacity basically sucked all the intelligence into one spot. But when it came to the initial stage, the construction of the Demona plant, Shimon Peres would eventually boast that, quote, not one penny for Demona came from the government budget.

The project was financed from contributions I raised from Jewish millionaires who understood the importance of the issue. The secret funding campaign to build Demona began at the end of 1958. It was known as the Committee of 30. Millionaires from around the world raised $40 million. That's almost $360 million in today's dollars, just to give you a sense, in the course of two years. And Abe Feinberg directed that process. He directed it while at the same time helping to hide it from the American government, or at least to keep a lid on the information. The 1950s were the great age of nuclear espionage. And in the summer of 1956, the United States deployed what they felt to be their unbeatable advantage, the U-2 reconnaissance plane.

Able to fly and glide for almost 11 hours, covering more than 5,000 miles, at heights greater than 65,000 feet, equipped with special lenses and cameras, it was a spy plane that could photograph a path from Moscow to Tashkent in one take. Now, its primary interest was the Soviet Union. But in the late 50s, the United States was also keeping its eyes on the Israeli desert. And that's because the President, the State Department, and the CIA had all been infuriated by Israel's successful attempt to hide the extent of its military buildup prior to the 1956 Suez invasion. Therefore, the U-2 was assigned periodic flyovers of the Negev. And in 1958, the CIA's photo interpreters were suddenly seeing a lot of activity at an Israeli Air Force practice bombing range south of Beersheba.

The underground digging had begun in early 58. Soon afterwards, they were seeing cement poured into heavy foundations. And the CIA interpreters had studied and visited nuclear weapon reactors in the U.S. They knew something unusual was going on. Quote, we spotted it right away. What was that big of a plant with reinforced concrete doing in the middle of the desert And here begins a long dance between America and Israel around the Israeli nuclear program For our purposes, there's no reason to detail the whole saga. By the way, if you take a look on the Patreon page to the bibliography, there's a great book called The Samson Option by Seymour Hersh. But for our purposes, for more than 10 years, the Americans continue to accumulate intelligence while Israel simply denied, denied, denied.

At first, they denied that Demota existed at all, or at least there was anything other than a textile plant or maybe a factory for processing manganese. But no one was buying that story. The French had turned Beersheba into little Paris, and everyone knew they were involved in constructing a reactor. The U-2 continued to provide detailed photographic evidence of such. And so the first phase of denial came to an end on December 9, 1960, when the Israeli ambassador to America was finally summoned to address the question of what on Earth, or under Earth, was going on in Demona. And not long after this, in what appears to be a planned leak, the story broke to the World Press on December 16th. The London Daily Express published a major, major column saying that, quote, the British and American intelligence authorities believe that the Israelis are well on the way to building their first experimental nuclear bomb.

Forewarned by the ambassador, Shimon Peres gathered all the people within the defense ministry, everybody who knew at least, of the Dimona reactor, and he summarized the cover story that would become Ben-Gurion's public stance on the issue. The reactor at Dimona was real, but it was part of a long-range program for development of the negative desert and existed only for peaceful purposes. Furthermore, those who called for inspection of the reactor are, quote, the same people who advocate the internationalization of Jerusalem. Remember, the best defense is a good offense. And the next day, for the first time, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion officially informed the Knesset about the reactor construction, describing it as, quote, dedicated entirely to peaceful purposes.

When he was asked specifically about the published reports in Europe and the United States that claimed Israel was developing the bomb, Ben-Gurion dismissed them as either deliberate or unconscious untruth. This, of course, was a bald-faced lie. And frankly, nothing new for Ben-Gurion. If you look back over his track record, it is clear that he and his associates were always prepared to say whatever was necessary for what they believed to be the good of the state. In his biography of Ben-Gurion, Michael Bar Zohar tells the Prime Minister's determination to shield his and the Israeli army's responsibility for the brutal 1953 retaliatory raid at Kibia. We spoke about it back in Episode 6. And you may recall that despite having ordered the attack himself, Ben-Gurion made a public statement, blaming it on the inhabitants of nearby Jewish border settlements, a blatant lie.

And when he was asked by a friend to explain his action, the Prime Minister cited a passage from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I hope you've read it. If not, turn it off, grab the book, and spend some hours. But in the scene, if you recall, a nun lies to the policeman about the whereabouts of an escaped prisoner. And he says, the nun committed no sin in lying because, quote, her lie was designed to save human life. A lie like that is measured by a different yardstick. And this is a question that everyone has to face in their own life. And certainly, when you're looking at a world leader like Ben-Gurion, who saw no choice, who knew that he was surrounded by implacable enemies, when he chose to lie, was that wrong?

Anyway, either way, a White House statement, personally approved by the President, released to the press on the day after Ben-Gurion's speech read, The government of Israel has given assurances that its new reactor is dedicated solely for research purposes, to develop scientific knowledge and thus to serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health and science. It is gratifying to note that as made public, the Israeli Atomic Energy Program does not represent cause for special concern. one could say that they swallowed the story hook, line, and sinker but you would have to add to that that they already knew it was a lie and I think I'm going to leave the question of what we call strategic ambiguity here because in 1960 the US was grateful to accept Ben Gurion's deception even though like I say many in the intelligence community knew it for the lie that it was you could spend quite a bit of time reflecting on why they would do such a thing maybe they saw Israel as a trusted ally and weren't sorry to see her armed.

Maybe they feared the Jewish lobby that was progressively becoming incredibly difficult to fight within democratic politics. Maybe they recognized that the Jews are simply a special case that don't fit the mold of world decision-making. Either way, there were difficult days ahead for the Demona Project. Some say that the issue of nuclear inspections poisoned the relationship between Ben Gurion and soon-to-be President Kennedy. And the final resolution in the back and forth between the U.S. and Israel was nominally a commitment from Israel to use the faculty for peaceful purposes and a U.S. inspection team that would visit twice a year. There were actually inspections between 1962 and 1969, but the inspectors saw only the above-ground part of the buildings, and they were shown even simulated control rooms.

The elevators leading to the secret underground plutonium reprocessing plant were actually bricked over while the inspectors were present on their twice-yearly pre-announced visits. Now, we may explore some of the cross-currents between Ben-Gurion and Kennedy and the whole issue at play there when we return to the story of American Jewry. But for now, I just want to note that the international complexity were matched by internal political struggles. In 1963, Ben-Gurion actually quit once again as Prime Minister, in part due to the accusation that his bomb project was an unbearable burden on the economy. Nevertheless, with all the complexities aside, from the moment that ground was broken on Dimona in 1958, the Israeli bomb was really a question of if, not when.

As far as is known, the Dimona reactor went critical in 1962. And the underground plutonium reprocessing plant, the key to transforming spent reactor fuel into weapons-grade material, was completed by the French contractors in 1964 or 65. And so we might ask, when then did Israel build its first bomb? Now you may know that to this very day, Israel practices what is known as strategic ambiguity. The government neither confirms nor denies the existence of nuclear weapons. As Shimon Peres once famously said, Israel promises not to be the first nation to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but we also promise not to be the second. Now, it's widely believed amongst intelligence agencies and governments that Israel is amongst the world's largest nuclear powers.

There are those who take great comfort in the deterrent power of the Israeli bomb, seeing our government as a mature player in this crazy region, and of course, thinking like, we have no choice. There are others out there who see us as the potential cause of global nuclear war. I'm not going to take a stance on that question, but I will end with this. And we're going to have to, I now realize, visit the depth which the following exposes in the divide of consciousness between American Jewish and Israeli Jewish experience. The coming episode or another one, I don't know when. It's got to happen because the summer of 1967 was a unique time for many Jews. For many American Jews, it was the summer of love.

For all Israeli Jews, it was a summer of fear and then salvation. For those Americans of the summer of love, if they thought about nuclear weapons at all that summer, it was most likely as a scourge, an evil, like the Vietnam War, a dangerous weapon that represented an existential threat to all mankind. For the Israelis, who were more or less ignorant of the fact that they were sitting on such a treasure, they were meant to be a salvation in last resort. Only a few years ago, retired Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaakov revealed to the world what he called an Israeli doomsday operation, meant to be invoked if Israel feared it was going to lose the impending 1967 war. And as General Yaakov tells the story, in May of 67, he initiated, drafted, and promoted a plan aimed at detonating a nuclear device in the eastern Sinai desert as a display of force.

He had a precedent for such an idea. The U.S. considered the same thing during the Manhattan Project, thinking that if they set off a blast near Japan, that would scare Emperor Hirohito into a quick surrender. But in the end, the military vetoed the idea, convinced it wouldn't be enough to end the war. And the result was Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Israeli plan was codenamed Shimshon, after the biblical hero who brought down the roof of the Philistine Temple, killing his enemies and his self. And I think, with the complexity of our conversation, it's probably worth it to end with the note that his last prayer was a prayer for vengeance, not salvation. O Lord, he said, please remember me and give me strength just this once, O God, to take revenge on the Philistines, if only for one of my two eyes.

And then he cried out, let me die with the Philistines. And he brought the world crashing down around him. All right, folks, I want to make a little bit of encouragement here. I'm thinking about whether to do season four, and I want your feedback. I want your feedback on what you think, what you'd like to hear, and most importantly, the best feedback you can give is by becoming a patron. Because when you put your money where your ears are, then I know you want the Jewish story to keep going. So go right now to my website, jewishstory.co. You'll see a button in the upper right-hand corner. You can click on that to make a little bit of per-podcast support. If that's a little bit too much an investment, you can also be in touch with me.

I'm happy to dedicate shows in the honor of those who are with us today or in the memory of those who have passed. And I want to thank all the folks who are already giving their hard-earned money to make the show possible, to keep it free and widely distributed. I want to thank the Land of Israel Network, that's thelandofisrael.com, for building a platform that allows me to reach so many awesome people out there. I want to thank the Pardes Institute, pardes.org.il, for building an educational institute that gives me the privilege of teaching so many wonderful Jews. And I want to thank you for listening. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and this is The Jewish Story. .