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The fact that Israel has nuclear weapons comes as no surprise. But Seymour Hersh has written a gripping and detailed account of how it got them--and how and why official Washington managed to avoid facing the fact for over 30 years.
I first became aware of Israel's nuclear weapons in 1968, as Hersh relates. As assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, I was assigned to negotiate the sale of F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft with Israel's then-Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin. President Lyndon Johnson turned the job over to the Defense Department because of Israeli concerns about possible pro-Arab sentiment in the State Department. When I pressed for Israel's objections to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Ambassador Rabin asked, "What is it to have a nuclear weapon? Do you have one if you do not say that you have one?" When I said that I believed Israel did indeed have one, Rabin did not deny it. The White House then called off my effort to link the F-4 sale to NPT adherence.
Although Israel has never admitted to having nuclear weapons, in recent years Israeli officials have become I increasingly willing to brandish a real-but-not-visible nuclear sword. In July 1988, Rabin, then defense minister, warned Arab countries of the consequences of using chemical weapons against Israel: "If, heaven forbid, they dare to employ these means, the response will be one hundred times stronger."
Hersh describes Israel's secret nuclear weapons facilities at Dimona in the Negev desert, developed in the 1950s and 1960s. With French assistance, the Israelis built an underground chemical reprocessing plant to generate plutonium for nuclear warheads. Persistent reports of this project were treated gingerly by American officials, who appeared willing to accept the position later voiced by Ambassador Rabin --that Israel need not be treated as a nascent nuclear power unless and until it admitted that it was one.
What the author calls the "see no evil, hear no...