WASHINGTON, Oct. 19--A new book says Israel has a nuclear arsenal far larger than previously suspected by the United States Government, and further asserts that a principal target for those arms has been the Soviet Union.
The book, by Seymour M. Hersh, an investigative reporter, says the Israelis have gone to
full nuclear alert--meaning that nuclear missiles have been wheeled out of silos and put on
launchers--three times, twice during the 1973 war and once earlier this year, while Israel was
under missile attack from Iraq. In those cases, the book says, the targets would have been
the Arab nations that were threatening Israel.
But, quoting Israeli and American officials who discussed the matter with the Israelis, Mr. Hersh says Israel's central strategic doctrine during the 1970's and much of the 1980's was that the Soviet Union should know that it was under the threat of Israeli nuclear attack. Mr. Hersh says Israel used American reconnaissance-satellite photos and other intelligence data--some of it obtained openly and some of it illegally--to target Soviet cities.
Israel has never acknowledged that it possesses nuclear weapons, though the United States and other governments have long maintained that Israel has a substantial stockpile of nuclear arms. The Israeli Government's general response to the allegations in Mr. Hersh's book was to restate the formulation it always offers when asked about its nuclear program.
"Israel is not going to be the first to introduce nuclear arms in the Middle East," said Danny Naveh, the Defense Ministry spokesman.
In interviews, officials and experts in the United States corroborates some of Mr. Hersh's
findings but disputed some others.
Mr. Hersh was a reporter for The New York Times from 1972 to 1979. He left the paper to write books but has come back The Times twice to work on special projects on a temporary basis, first in 1986. He is working for The Times now on another project, on a contract, in the paper's Washington bureau.
These are some of the other assertions in his book, titled 'The Sampson Option', which
is scheduled to be published on Sunday:
+Late in President Eisenhower's second term, intelligence officials ordered Gary Powers and other U-2 pilots to carry out surveillance flights over the site where Israel was building its nuclear reactor, at Dimona in the eastern Negev. By the end of 1958, former Government officials say, Washington was convinced that Israel was at work to produce a bomb. But successive Presidents, with the exception of President Kennedy, did little to restrain the Israeli program, afraid of adverse electoral repercussions at home.
+In the 1950's and 60's, the French Government sent hundreds of scientists and engineers to help the Israelis design and build their underground nuclear compound at Dimona. It has been generally known that France helped Israel in the early stages, but Mr. Hersh writes that the scale of that assistance was far greater than had been thought by American analysts who had studied the matter.
+President Kennedy repeatedly pressed David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, to give assurances that Israel was not pursuing the development of nuclear weapons. He finally won permission for an American inspector to examine the Dimona plant once each year. But the Israelis built a false control room and other fake sites and managed to convince the inspector year after year that Dimona was involved only in academic research.
+The weapons plant began production in 1968, after President Johnson had discontinued the fruitless inspections and decided he was no longer interested in pressing Israel on the issue. The Nixon Administration did not press the Israelis on the issue either because Henry A. Kissinger, the President's national security adviser, was generally sympathetic to the idea that Israel should possess nuclear arms. The Administration adopted that attitude even as it was taking a strong public stance against nuclear proliferation. Interviewed through an aide this week, Mr. Kissinger did not respond to a question on that point.
+Israel first went on nuclear alert early in the 1973 war, when Israel's leaders were convinced that the nation might be overrun within days. Mr. Hersh says the Israelis "blackmailed" the United States, in essence--threatening that they would have to use their nuclear weapons if the Nixon Administration did not immediately supply replacements for aircraft and ammunition expended in the war. That allegation has been made before, and in interviews, the principal Israeli and American officials involved in the discussions of that time deny it. But one American official quoted in the book offered indirect confirmation of the assertion.
+Late in the Carter Administration, the United States agreed to give Israel highly classified photos taken by American KH-11 reconnaissance satellites. The agreement was that the photos would show only areas within 100 miles of Israel's borders so the Israelis could be warned before any attack. But Israeli officials managed over time to acquire photos of ever larger areas, and used the KH-11 data in targeting the Iraqi nuclear reactor it raided in 1981. When first told of that raid, President Reagan is quoted as saying, "Boys will be boys."
+Jonathan J. Pollard, who was convicted of spying for Israel in 1987, was an Israeli agent for four years, not 17 months, as the United States has charged. He also passed on far more secret data than prosecutors originally charged. The Israeli who was his case officer in Washington was actually the officer responsible for aiming Israel's missiles at the Soviet Union, and much of the data Mr. Pollard provided was used to that end. The book says the idea behind that strategic doctrine was that Soviet intelligence agents would learn of the nuclear threat and that as a result Soviet leaders would limit their military aid to Arab allies in time of war.
+Citing two Israeli sources, one named and the other not, Mr. Hersh says Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir, who was trying to improve relations with the Soviet Union, gave Moscow
sanitized versions of certain secret intelligence documents that Mr. Pollard had provided.
To that assertion and others in Mr. Hersh's book, Mr. Shamir's spokesman, Ehud Gol, said
Mr. Shamir had not seen the book and would not comment on it "since we are engaged in the
important issue of promoting peace right now."
Many other authors and journalists have written about Israel's nuclear program, and much of the general story in Mr. Hersh's book, published by Random House, has been told before. But many of his specific allegations are new, and no one has published so exhaustive an account.
Mr. Hersh coined the phrase he used for the title of the book, 'The Samson Option'. With it he compares Israel's nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union to the story of Samson, who destroyed his Philistine captors by bringing the building down on top of everyone, including himself.
In the book, Mr. Hersh chronicles United States policy as well.
"America's policy toward the Israeli arsenal," he writes, "was not just one of benign neglect; it was a conscious policy of ignoring reality."
Now, he writes, Israel has "hundreds" of tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, including more than 100 nuclear artillery shells, nuclear landmines in the Golan Heights and "hundreds of low-yield neutron warheads capable of destroying large numbers of enemy troops."
In an interview about the book, a former senior intelligence official confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency had concluded during the 1970's that Israel had begun producing neutron bombs, which kill people without destroying property.
Today, the formal United States intelligence estimate is that that Israel has fewer than 100
nuclear weapons. Leonard S. Spector, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowmen in Washington who
has studied that issue for many years, said the "outside estimate" of others has been that
Israel has many as 200 warheads. Mr. Hersh says the number is 300 or more.
Most of Mr. Hersh's account of the program's early history, in the 1950's and 60's, is supported with declassified United States Government documents from that time and interviews with named American officials who discussed their actions and thinking then.
His account of more recent years relies more heavily on unnamed officials and private sources. Mr. Hersh says he did not visit Israel during his three years of research on the book. His concern, he said, was that if he had worked in Israel, he would have been subject to Israeli military censorship. Journalists working in Israel are not allowed to publish anything substantive on Israel's nuclear program.
Mr. Hersh says he interviewed many knowledgeable Israelis while they were traveling, in the United States and Europe. But the primary source for much of what he writes about the current state of Israel's nuclear program was Arie Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli official who was charged in New York two years ago with trying to sell Israeli-owned military equipment to Iran. The charges were dropped, but in the course of the proceedings Mr. Ben-Menashe asserted that he was a well-informed Israeli intelligence operative. The Israelis averred that he was merely a low-level translator.
Mr. Hersh quotes him often in the later chapters of his book, but in each case he also offers substantiation from at least one other source. Mr. Ben-Menashe, for example, is the original source for the assertion that Mr. Shamir authorized his aides to pass American intelligence data to the Soviet Union.
Mr. Hersh writes: "Ben-Menashe's account might seem too startling to be believed, had it not subsequently been amplified by a second Israeli who cannot be named. The Israeli said that the Pollard material was sanitized and dictated to a secretary before being turned over to the Soviets. Some material was directly provided to Yevgeny M. Primakov, the Soviet Foreign Ministry specialist on the Middle East."
No Soviet official has ever acknowledged that any such material was passed to Moscow.
In interviews, American analysts and former officials tended to corroborate some of Mr. Hersh's assertions while arguing with some others. For example, William B. Quandt, who was a senior National Security Council aide during the 1973 war, recalls: "We did pick up from electronic monitoring the Israeli missiles going on alert, getting ready to launch. They may have simply wanted us to believe that. But these missiles were inaccurate, and we knew that it would make no sense to launch them with a conventional warhead."
But with a nuclear warhead, it would not have mattered if the missile fell off target.
But Simcha Dinitz, who was the Israeli Ambassador to Washington at the time, flatly denied that Israel had warned Washington it would fire its missiles if not resupplied with arms.
Interviewed in Jerusalem, where he is now a senior immigration official, Mr. Dinitz said Mr. Hersh's assertion that he presented Israel's request, or threat, was "totally false" and added, "No such assertion was made."
Dr. Kissinger, who was said to have received the request, asserted that Israel never mentioned its nuclear potential during the war. Mr. Hersh's assertion, Dr. Kissinger said, was "a fabrication without a shred of truth."
One of Mr. Hersh's earlier books was an unflattering account of Dr. Kissinger's years
in the Nixon Administration.
In an interview, a former senior Nixon Administration official said: "I recall in mid-war the C.I.A. handing Dr. Kissinger a report on Israel's nuclear capabilities."
And in the book, Herman F. Eilts, who was the United States Ambassador to Egypt in the mid- 1970's, is quoted as recalling that, "in a casual reference" years later, Dr. Kissinger "threw in that there was a concern that the Israelis might go nuclear."
"There had been intimations that if they didn't get military equipment, and quickly, they might go nuclear," he said.
In an earlier chapter, Clark M. Clifford, who was Defense Secretary late in the Johnson Administration, is quoted as telling Mr. Johnson in 1968, "Mr. President, I don't want to live in a world where the Israelis have nuclear weapons."
The President is then quoted as telling Mr. Clifford, "Don't bother me with this anymore" and
then hanging up on him.
Mr. Clifford says he never spoke to Mr. Hersh and adds that his account of the
conversation "never happened." "That idea would never have entered my mind," he says, "and I did not
discuss that with the President."
(text of October 20, 1991 New York Times front-page article)
IRAN has obtained at least two nuclear warheads out of a batch officially listed as missing from the newly independent former Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, The European newspaper said yesterday.
The information was contained in a top-secret report sent by the New Russian intelligence service to the CIA, the paper said.
The document, a copy of which had been shown to The European, disclosed that several nuclear warheads vanished from the Semipalatinsk nuclear base, closed by Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
It said two of the nuclear weapons were smuggled across the border into Iran last year and were now under the control of Reza Ambrollahi, head of the Iranian atomic agency.
It said intelligence sources in Europe believed that Nazarbayev was behind the secret transfer.
The Russian report to the CIA disclosed that a third nuclear weapon, which went missing had
not yet been traced and was believed to be somewhere in the Mid-east.
(text of May 2, 1992 Saudi Gazette article)
Q: Why was the US Department of Defence interested in the dinosaurs?
SAGAN: It wanted to know if the climatic effects resulting from the catastrophe that destroyed most of the species of life on earth 65 million years ago could be caused by the ground bursts of nuclear weapons.
Q: What causes the dust in a nuclear explosion?
SAGAN: An explosion excavates a giant crater, pulverises the stuff and shoots it up into the skies. Scientists Paul Crutzen and John Birks have suggested that there would be another component far greater than the dust: soot caused by a nuclear war. None of our initial calculations considered the burning that would occur after a nuclear war particularly of cities, which are made of very burnable stuff.
Q: So the final calculation combined the effects of the dust and the emissions from fires?
SAGAN: That's right. Essentially, the dust and soot would envelop the earth at a very high altitude, darken it and cause a devastating drop in temperature, below the temperature of the planet during the last ice age. That is nuclear winter.
Q: Which is more threatening, a small country with weapons or a terrorist with a bomb?
SAGAN: Look at what one weapon can do versus what a hundred can do versus what a thousand can do. It's very clear that the biggest danger, in terms of both prompt and long-term effects, is from the nations that have hundreds or more.
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