Readers have probably already noted that Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ventured beyond the carefully worded description of Israel’s nuclear status—Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear arms in the region— in effect confirming Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons. Olmert, after making the standard statments, objected to comparing Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons with that of the United States, France, Russia … and Israel.
Oops.
Iran openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as France, America, Russia and Israel?
You can watch the gaffe (which happened in English) by clicking on the pictures of Olmert or read the transcript (in German, unfortunately):
Understanding the implication of Olmert’s slip requires a sense of why Israel chose and maintains a policy of nuclear opacity.
Israel’s refusal to acknowledge its nuclear weapons arises from a desire on the part of the United States and Israel to avoid an outright confrontation over the latter’s nuclear status—an agreement that dates to the Nixon Administration. The United States, although suspicious, was slow to recognize Israel’s successful development of nuclear weapons in the late 1960s.
The Nixon Administration conducted a very serious internal debate about whether or not to pressure Israel to forgo nuclear weapons—nuclear weapons that US officials were beginning to realize Israel already possessed.
The Nixon Administration’s internal debates culminated in a fascinating meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Nixon, as imagined by Avner Cohen and Bill Burr:
Perhaps the most mysterious event of this tale (perhaps even of the entire Nixon administration’s history) was Nixon’s one-on-one meeting with Meir in the Oval Office on September 26, 1969. Kissinger was in a meeting with Rabin and Rogers at the same time and apparently remained only partially informed about the details of the talk with Meir, even after Nixon debriefed him. Senior officials with a need to know would never find out what happened. Nixon later told Barbour that he dictated a record of the meeting, but if that record exists, it has not yet surfaced.
[snip]
Even without a record of this mysterious private meeting, informed speculation is possible. It is likely that Nixon started with a plea for honesty and openness on this most sensitive issue, as was appropriate to these two allies. Meir, in turn, probably acknowledged—in a tacit or explicit form—that Israel already had reached a weapons capability, which would have meant that pressing Israel to equate “non-introduction” with “non-possession” would be absurd. (Years later, Nixon told CNN’s Larry King that he knew for certain that Israel had the bomb, but he wouldn’t reveal his source.) It is also possible that Meir assured Nixon that Israel thought of nuclear weapons as a truly last-resort option, a way to provide her Holocaust-haunted nation with a psychological sense of existential deterrence.
[snip]
Politically, the Nixon-Meir agreement allowed both leaders to continue with their old public policies without being forced to publicly acknowledge the new reality. As long as Israel kept the bomb in the basement—which meant keeping the program under full secrecy, making no test, declaration, or any other visible act of displaying capability or otherwise transforming its status—the United States could live with Israel’s “non-introduction” pledge. A case in point: Even in a classified congressional hearing in 1975, the State Department refused to concur with the CIA estimate that Israel had the bomb.
Over time, the tentative Nixon-Meir understanding became the solid foundation for a remarkable and dramatic deal, accompanied by a strict but tacit code of behavior to which both nations closely adhered. The deal created a “don’t ask, don’t tell” stance. And the United States gave Israel a degree of political cover in international forums such as the NPT review conferences. Secrecy, taboo, and non-acknowledgement became embedded within the U.S.-Israeli posture.
I highly recommend Cohen and Burr’s article, “Israel crosses the threshold” (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 62:3, May/June 2006)—which comes with supporting primary documents on the National Security Archive website—and Cohen’s book, Israel and the Bomb.
Over time, of course, Israel’s policy of opacity also reduced some of the pressure on states such as Egypt to follow suit and join the nuclear club—Cohen and Bur note that even during the “darkest hours in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Israel was cautious not to make any public display in deed or word of its nuclear capability.”
Israel’s nuclear capability, however, has inreasingly become much harder to ignore—particularly after Mordechai Vanunu took his camera to work. As Israeli society has become increasingly open, the calls for revisiting Israel’s nuclear opacity come not primarily from the hawks, but from those—such as Cohen and Burr—who believe that Israel’s secrecy about nuclear weapons offends contemporary values of transparency and accountability, undermining Israel’s democractic values. This is a point that Cohen—often a target of Israel’s security apparatus—has eloquently argued before.
Israel has become, in recent years, somewhat more open about its nuclear program—if only because of the pressures generated by a democratic society. Israel’s military censors recently allowed the country’s Channel 10 to air a 14-minute video depicting wide-angle shots of Dimona and showing some external activities.
Olmert’s slip is likely to have, therefore, a much more profound impact on Israeli democracy than on Israel’s neighbors—most of whom, as Hans Blix noted , are “fairly sure” Israel possess nuclear weapons.
Olmert’s statement helps to demonstrate the widening gulf between the perogatives of Israel’s military censors and the needs of an open society. As one Israeli columnist wrote in Haaretz:
Olmert made a mockery of the military censor, who threatens the media with trials and fines for merely hinting at what he announced.
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