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A picture is worth… You already know the saying. But what’s a picture worth when it comes without a caption?

This may sound like an off-brand Zen koan, but it’s actually the windup to a small exercise in decoding ambiguous nuclear signaling.

Earlier this month, Amir Mizroch grabbed a rather unusual screen image from a TV news segment on Israel’s Channel One. It’s a still photo of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin (Bibi) Netanyahu visiting the Dimona nuclear complex in southern Israel.

This may well be the first new interior photo from Dimona to appear in the news media since The Sunday Times printed a few in 1986. It’s reproduced below.

Yes, there he is in a bunny suit, hand extended toward a mass of pipes and cylinders, bringing to mind nothing so much as a bigger, beardless, graying Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doing his annual runway strut on Iran’s National Nuclear Technology Day.

To be sure, there is a caption right there in the chyron, which Mizroch helpfully translates as, “The Prime Minister visits the Dimona nuclear reactor, receives briefing on the scientific programs undertaken there.”

Now, after all the hullaballoo lately over nuclear opacity, you have to wonder what the normally talkative Netanyahu aims to accomplish by this pantomime. He seems to be flirtatiously parting the veil.

Let’s flesh out the picture a little more. A few days after the news broadcast, the Prime Minister visited Hatzerim Air Base in the company of top defense ministry and military officials, where—among other things—he sat in the cockpit of an extended-range F-15I fighter-bomber, looking for all the world like a kid at an airshow. (You can watch him try on the helmet in this video.)

So now we have a full-blown game of charades going. Sounds like… fissile material… Rhymes with… airstrike… Wait! I think I have the answer: You’re running out of patience on Iran.

Perhaps needless to say, I’m wondering if the visit to Dimona was such a great idea. Nuclear opacity has its ups and downs, but chief among its virtues is the obstacle it poses to the production of rhetorical nuclear threats, even in a retaliatory vein. As U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo learned a few years ago, that sort of thing has a way of not working out too well. Trying to transmit roughly the same message by means of an interpretive dance honors the letter more than the spirit of opacity, and invites ugly misunderstandings. It’s just too clever by half.

But let’s leave aside quibbles and contentions. This is a wonky site, and the Dimona happy snap is nothing if not wonkporn. Can anyone out there identify the equipment in the background of the shot? It appears to be a series of fractionating columns or mixer-settlers. I don’t really know. One possibility is shown to the right: ion exchangers involved in the reprocessing of plutonium. (The image and caption are lifted from Chapter 9 of the DOE Annex 3 handbook.)

If that tentative identification is correct, then the secret decoder ring reveals the following message: Remember… that… we’ve… got… the… Bomb…

Comment [13]

Steve Clemons made a very funny observation the other day after Jon Stewart got John Bolton to say “I only want one government to have nuclear weapons … You’re sitting in it.” What about Israel?

Given [Bolton’s] typical lawyerly shrewdness that I have come to expect and never underestimate, I was stunned when he abandoned his support of Israel’s nuclear weapons stash.

John Bolton wants Israel to give up its nukes! Somebody call Eli Lake!

Comment [9]

I’ve been taking a blog break, but this one has my dander up.

The Washington Times created a tempest in a teapot with a very silly front-page “exclusive” today. It’s exclusive, all right. The article distorts a quote from Rose Gottemoeller to the effect of, the U.S. would like to see everyone in the NPT:

“Universal adherence to the NPT itself, including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea … remains a fundamental objective of the United States,” Gottemoeller told the meeting, which hopes to agree on an agenda and plan to overhaul the treaty at a review conference next year.

This is not exactly earth-shattering news. It’s the logical entailment of seeking a world without nuclear weapons. “World” would seem to indicate “everyone.” Now, it’s a safe bet that of the four states mentioned by Gottemoeller, North Korea is a lot higher on the list of America’s concerns than Israel. It’s also a safe bet that none of the four states will be joining the NPT anytime soon — rejoining it, in North Korea’s case.

Yet somehow, the Times would have us read these unobjectionable remarks as foreshadowing a demand upon Israel in particular to “come clean” about nuclear weapons, i.e., abandon its stance of “nuclear opacity,” which is designed to avoid unduly provoking the neighbors. Or perhaps they hint at coercing Israel into a Middle East Nuclear-Weapons Free Zone, which is something quite different — and something nobody outside of Riyadh imagines possible. The article makes much hay of the Nixon-Meir understanding of 1969, which Jeff discussed here awhile ago.

Let’s just calm down, already. This is an exercise in free association, not reporting.

Bottom Line

Everyone gets worked up about Israel’s nuclear status because, let’s face it, nuclear weapons are a status thing as much as — or even more than — a security thing. But no one should expect rapid changes. I can’t do better than to quote George Perkovich’s comments at the recent Carnegie Conference:

I also think it’s not constructive to kind of like call out and talk about Israel as having nuclear weapons and that, you know, people ought to come clean and so on. Seems to me the issue is ultimately of disarmament is you take unsafeguarded fissile materials and you try to make it all safeguarded. Whatever form it was in, you try to get it to a form where it’s monitored, it’s accounted for, and it’s clearly not weapons. Israel has unsafeguarded fissile materials. That’s known. We ought to be having a discussion about how you would verify, you know, and monitor all of these stockpiles over time. And it seems to me that can be constructive.

But the most important thing is it seems kind of – and I wouldn’t be defensive about it, but that’s why I’m not in the government – is you invite a regional discussion about this issue. How would we create a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East? And you invite all of the states in the region, and you have the little placards there for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, so on and so forth – and Israel. And I guarantee you, Israel will show up and other seats will be empty. And at that point you say, well, gee, there isn’t that much to talk about. We can’t solve any problems if the states that are needed to solve this problem won’t even come into a room with each other, let alone recognize their existence or have relations with them, let alone have peace treaties. And it seems to me that gets to the nub of the issue, which is you’re not going to get a zone free of weapons of mass destruction in a region where people don’t recognize each other’s right to exist. But I could be wrong.

That, it seems to me, is where the matter stands.

Update: If anybody is still agitated over this, the Jerusalem Post has a chill pill.

Update 2: It’s unfortunate that this sideshow has distracted from the real news, which is the success of the NPT PrepCom. That’s what the story should have been about in the first place.

Further updates: Last week, the Opinionator feature at nytimes.com gave this post of the honor of some attention. Later, Amir Oren of Ha’aretz wrote about this tsunami in a test tube, a tempest in a heavy-water teapot. Now, Avner Cohen and George Perkovich have weighed in with their own take on the story.

Further, further update: Somehow, I missed Laura Rozen’s take on this story.

Comment [11]

click on the image for a larger version

A recent London Times article reports that Israel is worried about Hamas using its artillery rockets to shell the Dimona reactor. I thought it would be interesting to calculate the probability of one of those rockets actually hitting the reactor containment vessel, which is 18 m is radius. Of course, if it was really an artillery rocket, it might have to hit it twice, once to penetrate the containment vessel and once to blow up the reactor. But that is a refinement we won’t go into right now.

Of course, we need to decide which rocket Hamas might actually use. The Times reports the Israelis are worried about the Fajr-3, which, according to globalsecurity.org, has a range of 45 km while Dimona is approximately 80 km away from the closest point to the Gaza Strip. So it’s probably not the Fajr-3. Perhaps they meant the Fajr-5, which has a range, according to globalsecurity.org, of 75 km. While Dimona is seemingly beyond the range of even the Fajr-5, there is considerable uncertainty in those sorts of quantities so it is at least possible.

If we use the 3000 m CEP for the Fajr-5, there is a 0.004% chance that its 90 kg warhead will hit the reactor containment vessel. (The only reference I found for the Fajr-5’s CEP was by Oliver Schmidt which lists it as 3000 m.) If, on the other hand, Hamas had managed to smuggle in Zalzel-2 guided missiles, which is said to have a CEP of 200 m, then there is a 0.3% chance of hitting the containment vessel with each rocket.

Comment [29]

New Year’s resolution: Get back to blogging regularly.

There were a couple of stories that I blogged about towards the end of last year—potential nuclear sales to Pakistan and Israel—that I had been meaning to follow up on but never got around to in the debris that was the end of 2008. For some of you, particularly readers of Mark Hibbs, some of this might be old news. If that applies you, my apologies.

According to a story from Hibbs in Nucleonics Week from November 6, it turns out that the Pakistan-China deal never actually was.

Apparently not only is there no agreement for new reactor sales but, at the moment, Pakistan could not afford them anyway. So, where did the story come from? According to Hibbs, it originated in Pakistan:

Some of these officials [his sources for the story] suggested that Pakistan last month raised the issue of Chinese PWR imports to media outlets to put pressure on the NSG to grant Pakistan—as it did India in September—an exemption from NSG trade restrictions banning reactor exports to states without full-scope safeguards.

In the December 15 Nucleonics Week Hibbs has an excellent background piece on a potential US-Israel deal in return for Israeli ratification of the CTBT. Predictably, many NSG members are unenthusiastic:

One official said that, in 2007 and 2008, some NSG members notified the US informally that they would not support granting an exception to Israel, and officials from some NSG member states suggested this month that CTBT ratification by Israel would not suffice to prompt the NSG to permit vendors in NSG members to export controlled nuclear items to Israel.

Several NSG representatives said that, to qualify for an exemption, Israel would have to take steps consistent with a future global fissile material cut-off treaty, or FMCT, such as agreeing to a verified shutdown of its reactor at Dimona, at the Negev Nuclear Research Center, which is widely believed to have produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.

Much also depends on personnel changes within Israel. Within the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, the Director General Gideon Frank and his deputy Ariel Levite have retired and were replaced by Shaul Chorev and David Danielli respectively. How they view the trade-offs potentially necessary to effect the deal is unclear. There will also certainly be a change at the very top with elections and Olmert standing down. In particular, Netanyahu who may well win, is known to vehemently oppose an FMCT.

The prospects for either of these deals in the short term are clearly poor (and so much the better some of us would say). In the longer term, however, I wouldn’t write them off. One interesting tidbit I picked up over Christmas is that the current IAEA Director-General is very strongly in favour of both of them. Although, of course, he isn’t much longer for this job. We wait to hear what his successor thinks.

Comment [4]

After the US-India deal and the possible China-Pakistan deal (which, the US is now officially opposing, by the way), a US-Israel deal was always going to be a possibility. The price? Unknown, but CTBT ratification appears to be part of it, the latest CTBTO newsletter gleefully reports:

Mark Hibbs of Nucleonics Week reports that if the U.S. Senate ratifies the CTBT, Israel will follow suit in an effort to get the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) to lift its trade embargo against Israel. According to diplomatic sources, senior officials have urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to ratify the CTBT to help make the point that Israel’s nonproliferation credentials are stronger than India’s. The latter has received an NSG exemption thanks to strong U.S. backing, but has yet to sign and ratify the CTBT. Nucleonics Week, Volume 49 / Number 48 / November 27, 2008, p. 7 (subscription only)

Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure what this newsletter is (it’s not Spectrum) but it just started showing up in my inbox and usefully contained a story I had heard about on a not-for-blogging-basis.

Anyway, the prospect of a US-Israel deal in return for CTBT ratification might leave the CTBTO very happy, but I’m not sure their neighbours in the IAEA feel exactly the same way.

Comment [10]

A new CFR/Brookings study, Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President, recommends that the United States “enhance Israel’s deterrent and defensive capabilities by offering it a nuclear guarantee” (p.16). The study is edited by Richard Haass and Martin Indyk. The recommendation is broached in their introductory chapter, and echoed by Bruce Riedel and Gary Samore in their chapter on nuclear proliferation (p.116).

The 288-page study recommends a very compelling new strategy of diplomatic engagement with Iran, but assumes that Israel will oppose it and take military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities at some point in the near future. Thus, the goal of the nuclear guarantee is to “persuade Israel not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities” and buy time for the proposed new U.S.-led diplomatic initiative to unfold.

The overall study is quite good, but the sloppy, casual logic underlying the nuclear guarantee recommendation is rather breathtaking. The authors note that “the United States, with its thousands of nuclear weapons and delivery systems, has a ready fallback to a posture of nuclear deterrence while it works to curb Iran’s nuclear capabilities” (p.15). True, but Israel already possesses a very capable nuclear deterrent of its own, which, remarkably, is acknowledged with merely a passing reference (p.116). It is simply not clear to me how or why a U.S. guarantee would make any difference in an Israeli calculation whether to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities. Maybe it would, but for a recommendation this bold, the authors really should have presented some specific evidence (a poll, perhaps).

Moreover, the study is strangely silent on key details and trade-offs associated with extending the umbrella to Israel. For example, would we station weapons in Israel like we do for NATO? And would the guarantee be public or private? Presumably, it would have to be very public, because otherwise it couldn’t affect Iran’s behavior or political debates within Israel over whether to support America’s new diplomatic initiative. But a public guarantee would almost certainly create severe political problems for the United States in the region and beyond. I think it would be the kiss of death for efforts to attract robust Muslim country support for addressing regional proliferation concerns such as Iran and Syria, fuel cycle reform, strong export controls, and other key nonproliferation priorities.

Besides, isn’t it already reasonable for Iran (or any country) to assume that the United States would use every tool of national power at its disposal to protect Israel if its existence were credibly threatened? It seems to me that all a public guarantee would do is introduce a new set of contentious, complicated issues into an already troubled region.

Addendum: Check out my colleague Peter Juul’s insightful analysis over at Wonk Room.

Comment [19]

Avner Cohen asks an interesting question about a speech in Tel Aviv by Tony Cordesman.

Cordesman told audiences that Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman ot the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was delivering a message when he said that Israel did not have a green light to attack Iran:

Cordesman is visiting Israel this week, and gave a lecture yesterday at Tel Aviv University and at Hebrew University on Sunday. He talked about Mullen’s comments last week in Washington when the Admiral said such an Israeli attack would be dangerous and could destabilize the Middle East. Mullen spoke after returning from a visit to Israel, during which he met with Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and other senior IDF officers.

Cordesman said Mullen came to Israel to deliver a message – that Israel did not have a green light to attack Iran and that it would not receive U.S. support for such a move.

According to Cordesman, Mullen was expressing the official opinion of the U.S. administration, including that of President George W. Bush and the National Security Council.

Avner asked me to put the question to my readers:

I have the gut feeling that Tony is right about Mullen’s mission, and surely there is much more going on than meets the eye.

This means that notwithstanding the Syrian thing, Israel is not allowed to act in Iran. At least not now. But why Mullen was asked to convey the message to the IDF? Is this something that was left opaque in the “frank” and “extensive” talk between Olmert and Bush? Is this an actual warning?

Your thoughts. Any of your blog’s readers maybe has a comment.

Comment [36]

So says the 1974 Special National Intelligence Assessment, “Prospects for further proliferation of nuclear weapons,” declassified the other day by the Bush administration. Avner Cohen and William Burr were able to get a portion of the document released in early 2006 under the Freedom of Information Act, but now the whole shebang is public.

I haven’t been able to find the text, but Haaretz has the best coverage so far of this breaking story.

Update: The document is available on the CIA’s FOIA page (thanks Allen!). It’s the fifth document down. I’ve also taken the liberty of converting the document to a .pdf file so it can be saved and downloaded.

Later Update, from Jeffrey As usual, the National Security Archive has been on top of the story since I was a child.

Comment [7]

When I hear “Dimona,” I think super-secret Israeli nuke program. I mean, doesn’t everyone? Little did I know that other grand secrets can be found in this little part of the Israeli desert. Who cares about the nukes when you suddenly discover that Dimona is in fact also home of the nicest bathroom in Israel.

But let me start at the beginning.

I was traveling in Israel last week. I’ll post some fun pictures of the Lebanon border (big fence) the Syria border (big mountains) and the security wall (again, big fence) later. Of course, I couldn’t help but notice signs we passed with arrows towards Dimona. Signs for the town of course, but I didn’t sweat over the Deadly Arsenals map for nothing. The reactor is close. (Here all nice and blurry on google earth).

As luck would have it, we did drive right through the town of Dimona, and along the road where, for a good long stretch, you can see the reactor dome sort of gleaming in the distance. Driving from the town of Dimona towards the Dead Sea, a large sparse area with low rolling hills opens up on the right. A serious looking security fence runs along the side of the road.

The Israeli guide on the trip told a nice story about the super-secret Israeli Krembo chocolate factory over to the right. So secret is the Krembo recipe that Israel has shot down a plane which wandered over the factory, and the man who revealed chocolate secrets to the world was put in jail for a long long time. Very cute. I was amused.

Now the good stuff. In the town of Dimona itself, there is a shopping mall. Rolling into the parking lot, I started hearing comments about the bathrooms. The mall looked decent, average even. But then I turned a corner and was witness to the super-secret Israeli bathroom program, no fences. No, it’s not a brochure. I sneaked a super secret photo.

Comment [3]