Israel and the Bomb

Israel and the Bomb
Author: Avner Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 493
Release: 1998-09-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231500092

Until now, there has been no detailed account of Israel's nuclear history. Previous treatments of the subject relied heavily on rumors, leaks, and journalistic speculations. But with Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen has forged an interpretive political history that draws on thousands of American and Israeli government documents—most of them recently declassified and never before cited—and more than one hundred interviews with key individuals who played important roles in this story. Cohen reveals that Israel crossed the nuclear weapons threshold on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, yet it remains ambiguous about its nuclear capability to this day. What made this posture of "opacity" possible, and how did it evolve? Cohen focuses on a two-decade period from about 1950 until 1970, during which David Ben-Gurion's vision of making Israel a nuclear-weapon state was realized. He weaves together the story of the formative years of Israel's nuclear program, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the sophisticated technology it needed, to the failure of American intelligence to identify the Dimona Project for what it was, to the negotiations between President Nixon and Prime Minister Meir that led to the current policy of secrecy. Cohen also analyzes the complex reasons Israel concealed its nuclear program—from concerns over Arab reaction and the negative effect of the debate at home to consideration of America's commitment to nonproliferation. Israel and the Bomb highlights the key questions and the many potent issues surrounding Israel's nuclear history. This book will be a critical resource for students of nuclear proliferation, Middle East politics, Israeli history, and American-Israeli relations, as well as a revelation for general readers.

Israel and the Bomb

Israel and the Bomb
Author: Avner Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 500
Release: 1998
Genre: Israel
ISBN: 9780231104821

This interpretive political history that draws on thousands of American and Israeli government documents--most of them recently declassified and never before cited--and more than one hundred interviews with key individuals who played important roles in this story.

The Bomb in the Basement

The Bomb in the Basement
Author: Michael Karpin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2007-01-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 0743265955

"Significant change took place when President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger adopted a new strategy.

The Worst-Kept Secret

The Worst-Kept Secret
Author: Avner Cohen
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 411
Release: 2010-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 0231510268

Israel has made a unique contribution to the nuclear age. It has created a special "bargain" with the bomb. Israel is the only nuclear-armed state that does not acknowledge its possession of the bomb, even though its existence is a common knowledge throughout the world. It only says that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East. The bomb is Israel's collective ineffable the nation's last great taboo. This bargain has a name: in Hebrew, it is called amimut, or opacity. By adhering to the bargain, which was born in a secret deal between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, Israel has created a code of nuclear conduct that encompasses both governmental policy and societal behavior. The bargain has deemphasized the salience of nuclear weapons, yet it is incompatible with the norms and values of a liberal democracy. It relies on secrecy, violates the public right to know, and undermines the norm of public accountability and oversight, among other offenses. It is also incompatible with emerging international nuclear norms. Author of the critically acclaimed Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen offers a bold and original study of this politically explosive subject. Along with a fair appraisal of the bargain's strategic merits, Cohen critiques its undemocratic flaws. Arguing that the bargain has become increasingly anachronistic, he calls for a reform in line with domestic democratic values as well as current international nuclear norms. Most ironic, he believes Iran is imitating Israeli amimut. Cohen concludes with fresh perspectives on Iran, Israel, and the effort toward global disarmament.

Raid on the Sun

Raid on the Sun
Author: Rodger Claire
Publisher: Crown
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2004-04-13
Genre: History
ISBN: 0767918088

The first authorized inside account of one of the most daring—and successful—military operations in recent history From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned—especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapons-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb. The reactor formed the heart of a huge nuclear plant situated twelve miles from Baghdad, 1,100 kilometers from Tel Aviv. By 1981, the reactor was on the verge of becoming “hot,” and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew he would have to confront its deadly potential. He turned to Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry to secretly plan a daring surgical strike on the reactor—a never-before-contemplated mission that would prove to be one of the most remarkable military operations of all time. Written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all of the eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israel’s first astronaut and perished tragically in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel plotted the unthinkable: defying its U.S. and European allies to eliminate Iraq’s nuclear threat. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, journalist Rodger Claire re-creates a gripping tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the then-new, radically sophisticated F-16 fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000-plus-kilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligence’s incredible “black ops” to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilot’s-eye view of the action on June 7, 1981, when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula for the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.

Shadow Strike

Shadow Strike
Author: Yaakov Katz
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2019-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1250191270

A 2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist "At the top of my reading list." —Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School "Reads like an international thriller, but it is actually a compelling factual day-by-day (and sometimes hour-by-hour) account of an incident of acute threat and decisive action by the Jewish state...". —Jonathan Kirsch, Jewish Journal Review The never-before-told inside story of how Israel stopped Syria from becoming a global nuclear nightmare—and its far-reaching implications On September 6, 2007, shortly after midnight, Israeli fighters advanced on Deir ez-Zour in Syria. Israel often flew into Syria as a warning to President Bashar al-Assad. But this time, there was no warning and no explanation. This was a covert operation, with one goal: to destroy a nuclear reactor being built by North Korea under a tight veil of secrecy in the Syrian desert. Shadow Strike tells, for the first time, the story of the espionage, political courage, military might and psychological warfare behind Israel’s daring operation to stop one of the greatest known acts of nuclear proliferation. It also brings Israel’s powerful military and diplomatic alliance with the United States to life, revealing the debates President Bush had with Vice President Cheney and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert as well as the diplomatic and military planning that took place in the Oval Office, the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem, and inside the IDF’s underground war room beneath Tel Aviv. These two countries remain united in a battle to prevent nuclear proliferation, to defeat Islamic terror, and to curtail Iran’s attempts to spread its hegemony throughout the Middle East. Yaakov Katz's Shadow Strike explores how this operation continues to impact the world we live in today and if what happened in 2007 is a sign of what Israel will need to do one day to stop Iran's nuclear program. It also asks: had Israel not carried out this mission, what would the Middle East look like today?

Samson Option

Samson Option
Author: Seymour M. Hersh
Publisher:
Total Pages: 356
Release: 1991-02-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780756755119

Israel has been a nuclear power for more than 25 years. Yet even in 1991, Israeli officials denied that their country possessed an atomic arsenal. Here, for the first time is the story of the Israeli nuclear weapons program & its influence on world events. Recounts Israel's clandestine nuclear mission, from the building of a reactor site in the Negev desert during the late 1950s, to the establishment by the late 1970s of a sophisticated underground nuclear production facility that targeted & threatened Israel's enemies in the Middle East as well as the Soviet Union itself. America turned a blind eye toward Israel's nuclear capacity while paying lip service to the goal of nuclear non-proliferation.

Triple Cross

Triple Cross
Author: Louis Toscano
Publisher: Knightsbridge Publishing Company
Total Pages: 340
Release: 1991
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 9781561290482

Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel

Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel
Author: Roger J. Mattson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016-02-16
Genre: Atomic bomb
ISBN: 9781515083917

In the mid 1960s, hundreds of kilograms of highly enriched uranium went missing from a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant called NUMEC in Apollo, PA. From the time the Atomic Energy Commission first discovered that significant amounts of this atom-bomb-making material were missing, there was a concern that it went to Israel because of the connection between the plant's owners and Israeli nuclear and intelligence officials. Because of the enormously high stakes involved, denial and deception have clouded the affair for half a century. Although the AEC, its successor agency the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the FBI, the CIA, the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, the General Accounting Office, the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives and four presidential administrations purported to investigate what became of the uranium, they never found it. They all acknowledged that the material might have made its way to Israel, and some in high position were certain it went there, but, until recently, proof was veiled in secrecy. This book brings together for the first time recently discovered personal papers of the lead CIA agent, recently declassified files of NRC, GAO, FBI and CIA, and interviews of U.S. government investigators. The author is an engineer who led a 1977 NRC investigation of the affair that was thwarted by unwarranted secrecy and interagency bumbling. This book culminates years of research to get at the facts and set the record straight.

Foxbats Over Dimona

Foxbats Over Dimona
Author: Isabella Ginor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300135041

Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez’s groundbreaking history of the Six-Day War in 1967 radically changes our understanding of that conflict, casting it as a crucial arena of Cold War intrigue that has shaped the Middle East to this day. The authors, award-winning Israeli journalists and historians, have investigated newly available documents and testimonies from the former Soviet Union, cross-checked them against Israeli and Western sources, and arrived at fresh and startling conclusions. Contrary to previous interpretations, Ginor and Remez’s book shows that the Six-Day War was the result of a joint Soviet-Arab gambit to provoke Israel into a preemptive attack. The authors reveal how the Soviets received a secret Israeli message indicating that Israel, despite its official ambiguity, was about to acquire nuclear weapons. Determined to destroy Israel’s nuclear program before it could produce an atomic bomb, the Soviets then began preparing for war--well before Moscow accused Israel of offensive intent, the overt trigger of the crisis. Ginor and Remez’s startling account details how the Soviet-Arab onslaught was to be unleashed once Israel had been drawn into action and was branded as the aggressor. The Soviets had submarine-based nuclear missiles poised for use against Israel in case it already possessed and tried to use an atomic device, and the USSR prepared and actually began a marine landing on Israel’s shores backed by strategic bombers and fighter squadrons. They sent their most advanced, still-secret aircraft, the MiG-25 Foxbat, on provocative sorties over Israel’s Dimona nuclear complex to prepare the planned attack on it, and to scare Israel into making the first strike. It was only the unpredicted devastation of Israel’s response that narrowly thwarted the Soviet design.