by Marsha B. Cohen
Once again revelations concerning the genesis of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons program are attracting notice.
Two nuclear experts, Victor Gilinsky and Roger J. Mattson, have again raised questions as to how Israel might have acquired the nuclear materials needed to build its nuclear [...]]]>
by Marsha B. Cohen
Once again revelations concerning the genesis of Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons program are attracting notice.
Two nuclear experts, Victor Gilinsky and Roger J. Mattson, have again raised questions as to how Israel might have acquired the nuclear materials needed to build its nuclear bombs in a provocatively titled article, “Did Israel steal bomb-grade uranium from the United States?”
Why now? The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), the nation’s highest classification authority, has released a number of top-level government memoranda that may provide additional grounds for suspecting that during the 1960s, bomb-grade uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) reprocessing plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania made its way into Israel’s nuclear weapons program. “The newly released documents also expose government efforts, notably during the Carter administration, to keep the NUMEC story under wraps, an ironic twist in view of Jimmy Carter’s identification with opposition to nuclear proliferation,” write Gilinsky and Mattson in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.
Four years ago, in March 2010, the two researchers wrote “Revisiting the NUMEC Affair” for the Bulletin. They contended there was abundant evidence available from declassified documents to support suspicions that at least some of the 337 kg. of radioactive materials that had gone missing from NUMEC in the 1960s from the plant in Apollo had been stolen and taken to the nuclear research reactor in Dimona, Israel. The cited documents also reveal that the FBI, CIA, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and members of the top echelons of the U.S. national security establishment were aware that NUMEC’s founder and president, Zalman Shapiro, not only had ties to Israeli intelligence officers and operatives with science-related job descriptions, but had also allowed them into the NUMEC plant.
Among them was Rafael Eitan, a “chemist” for Israel’s Defense Ministry who also happened to be a former Mossad officer, as well as the handler of naval intelligence spy, Jonathan Pollard, who has been in the news recently. Just how much was already known about Eitan’s role in NUMAC’s “diversion” of nuclear materials to Israel, and the extent of Israeli espionage activities conducted in the U.S. — second only to that of the KGB according to one top-level source quoted by name — is evident from a 1986 article by Washington Post reporter Charles Babcock about the Pollard case.
Grant W. Smith, Director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) followed up Gilinsky and Matson’s 2011 disclosures with a report based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other documentary evidence including corporate filings, office diaries and unguarded interviews. The report was published in January 2012 as a book titled, Divert! NUMEC, Zalman Shapiro and the diversion of US weapons grade uranium into the Israeli nuclear weapons Program. According to Smith, former CIA Tel Aviv station chief John Hadden claimed that NUMEC was “an Israeli operation from the beginning.”
Gilinksy and Mattson, initially more circumspect in drawing conclusions than Smith — in part because the released documents are highly redacted – credited Smith with having kept up the pressure for the release of more declassified documents. On March 18 the ISCAP released 84 additional pages (PDF) of previously classified documents related to concerns about the illegal diversion of weapons-grade nuclear material from NUMEC to Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The new documents include:
In their most recent article for the Bulletin, Gilinsky and Mattson sum up what the various declassified documents, including those most recently released, confirm about NUMEC’s probable role in providing Israel with highly enriched uranium with which to produce nuclear weapons:
NUMEC’s unexplained losses were a significantly larger proportion of its output of highly enriched uranium than was the case for other firms that dealt with nuclear materials. Sloppy accounting and lax security made the plant easy to rob without detection. NUMEC had commercial relationships with Israel’s defense and nuclear establishments and regularly made sizeable nuclear shipments to Israel, which at that time were not checked by the AEC. NUMEC’s owners and executives had extremely close ties to Israel, including to high Israeli intelligence and nuclear officials. Israel had strong motives to obtain the highly enriched uranium before it was producing enough plutonium for weapons. High-level Israeli intelligence operatives visited the NUMEC plant. Israeli intelligence organizations were used to running logistically complicated, risky operations to support nuclear weapons development, and it would have been very much out of character for them to pass up an opportunity like this.
Why does it matter now?
Despite its continuing denials, it is almost universally recognized that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, and there’s next to zero likelihood Israel will give them up. Does it matter how Israel got its nuclear materials half a century ago, and if so, why?
1. The environmental disaster NUMEC left behind. NUMEC’s carelessness in handling its toxic nuclear waste left behind an environmental disaster that has barely been addressed. Cleaning up the Shallow Land Disposal Area in Parks Township, Pennsylvania, contaminated by radioactive leakage from drums of toxic chemical and radioactive waste dumped by NUMEC and its successors — the Atlantic Richfield Co. and BWX Technologies (also known as Babcock & Wilcox) – may cost as much as half a billion dollars, according to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Wall Street Journal. The cleanup began in 2011 but was halted soon afterwards, and it won’t resume until 2015. In the hands of a new contractor, the cleanup may last a decade, and even then the chances of success are uncertain. Declassification of more NUMEC-related documents could facilitate the cleanup and even reduce its cost by disclosing details about where and how the toxic nuclear materials were discarded.
2. The proposed release of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. A CIA damage assessment of the Pollard case was declassified in December 2013. Although Pollard himself was only a small cog in the Israeli espionage network, Smith points out that none of the files handed over by Pollard to his handler, Rafael Eitan, part of the Israeli team visiting NUMEC in 1968, have ever been returned. He recommends that “if President Obama releases Pollard, it should be preceded by the belated return of the massive trove of classified documents he stole for Israel as well as all purloined nuclear materials and technologies.”
3. Undermining assertions of U.S. commitment to transparency in governance. “Nearly 50 years have passed since the events in question,” Gilinsky and Mattson contend. “It is time to level with the public. At this point it is up to the president himself to decide whether to declassify completely the NUMEC documents, all of which are over 30 years old. He should do so. We know that is asking a lot given the president’s sensitivity about anything involving Israel, and especially anything relating to Israeli nuclear weapons. But none of his political concerns outweigh his responsibility to tell the US public the historical truth it deserves to know.”
4. Undermining U.S. commitment to nuclear nonproliferation. “We’ve lost a great deal of respect around the world on the subject of nonproliferation,” Gilinsky told Global Security Newswire (GSN) in an e-mail interview. “The president doesn’t even acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons, which means no one in the government can…Leveling on [this] affair, painful as it might be in the short run, would be a step toward what you might call a reality-based policy in this area.”
5. Future relations with Iran and North Korea. Mattson opined to GSN that disclosure of whatever the U.S. knows about the disappearance and diversion of nuclear materials from NUMEC would be to Washington’s advantage in dealing with Iran and North Korea, irrespective of whether or not Israel was the perpetrator of nuclear theft. In negotiating with Iran and North Korea, “it is important for all sides to come to the table openly and honestly, as they declare their various interests in the deal they are trying to strike.” U.S. credibility would be enhanced by the full declassification of documents from the 1960s and 70s, especially if these documents were to reveal that the U.S. has been frank and forthright about NUMEC. If the U.S. hasn’t been honest up until now, Mattson sees the NUMEC document declassification as an opportunity to “atone for past mistakes and go back to the negotiating table refreshed by the experience” thereby setting an example for states that it accuses of duplicity.
]]>by James A. Russell
News that the Obama administration is considering releasing the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard as part of an attempt to breath life into the Israel-Palestine peace talks is a sign of negotiations that have become a road to nowhere.
Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration deserve [...]]]>
by James A. Russell
News that the Obama administration is considering releasing the convicted spy Jonathan Pollard as part of an attempt to breath life into the Israel-Palestine peace talks is a sign of negotiations that have become a road to nowhere.
Secretary of State John Kerry and the Obama administration deserve credit for attempting to convince both parties to take steps that serve their interests: to reach peaceful accommodation for an independent Palestinian state. The negotiations, however, recall an essential time honored truth of life and politics: you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
The Obama administration may wish to release Pollard, but it should be under no illusions that his release will somehow increase Israel’s enthusiasm for peace talks with the Palestinians. Israel would enthusiastically welcome Pollard as a national hero, and then go back to its US-subsidized good life behind its walls that protect the beautiful beaches and café’s of Tel Aviv and elsewhere.
As the occupying military power, the Israelis hold most of the cards in the asymmetric bargaining framework. Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benajmin Netanyahu, the Israelis continually demonstrate their abiding disinterest in living peacefully with the Palestinians despite the obvious benefits that a settlement would offer.
The view from Israel
Israel regards its strategic problems in purely military terms and sees no benefits to a different set of political relationships that might make its neighbors less hostile. A deal with the Palestinians might unlock the door to these possibilities, but Israel would have to decide to insert the key into the lock to find out what’s on the other side. One can only conclude that Israel has no interest in altering political relations with its neighbors and creating a more cooperative regional political framework. Life is good on their Mediterranean beaches.
Ignoring the requests of their benefactor and most important political supporter, Israel continues to build new settlements in illegally occupied lands and continues to squeeze the Palestinian population on the West Bank into constricted cantonment areas surrounded by troops and roadblocks that make the concept of an independent state simply impossible.
Some reports suggest that Israel is even insisting on what would amount to a permanent Israeli military presence in the Jordan River valley as part of a settlement. What country in the modern world could agree to such a situation and still be regarded as a country?
For their part, the Palestinians have little leverage in the negotiations since they are under military occupation and are being actively denied the ability to function as a coherent state. They have already acceded to Israeli demands to set up their own security force, but are left without the accompanying political institutions to provide governance and public services. So the Palestinians are left in a perennial catch-22 situation in which the Israelis demand that they act like a state while Israel simultaneously denies them the ability to function as one.
This returns us to the issue of the Jonathan Pollard. Americans forget that the Israelis rented out an apartment on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC filled with copying machines to deal with the volume of top secret classified material that Pollard passed to his Israeli handlers. Israel allegedly passed some of that information to the Soviet Union in exchange for an increase in the numbers of Soviet Jews allowed to emigrate to Israel. Pollard is said to have provided thousands of sensitive classified documents to Israel that were never returned to the United States. The Reagan-era Cold Warrior Caspar Weinberger would no doubt turn over in his grave if he knew what was afoot with Pollard today.
Cold War remnants
In some ways, the focus on Pollard is emblematic of an issue and an epoch in US international relations that has disappeared into the rearview mirror — at least for the United States. Today, the United States talks of the pivot to Asia and is left with a series of politico-military relationships throughout the Middle East formed during the heat of the Cold War that have lost much of their strategic impetus. Israel is no exception to this phenomenon.
The main US Cold War allies of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel — all joined by a congruence of interests — are slowly but surely becoming unglued in the 21st century as the winds of change blow across the region. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt are now the forces of counter-revolution simultaneously seeking to preserve monarchy, a military dictatorship, and a permanent occupation — all of which places these countries on the wrong side of history.
For the United States, these relationships made sense in the Cold War as it sought to hold the line against Soviet influence and, in the case of Saudi Arabia, as it helped build the epicenter of the global oil industry that exists to this day in the Persian Gulf.
The US-Israeli relationship was cemented in this period, and Israel today stands as the unrivaled regional military superpower courtesy of the United States. The US-Saudi relationship was similarly constructed, with the United States helping the House of Saud construct a security apparatus second to none in the region. The story of the US-Egyptian relationship is similar — with the Egyptian security apparatus built and funded with US money and military equipment.
New interests
At one time, the Arab-Israeli dispute was seen as a lynchpin to regional stability and critical to US interests. Today, however, that calculus has changed. The conflict has devolved into a persistent irritant for the United States but has lost its importance in the global scheme of things as a strategic imperative.
Today, the stakes in the Iran nuclear program are far more significant for American interests and are justifiably receiving the attention of senior decision-makers in the Obama administration. Moreover, the US ability to influence the direction of the region’s political evolution in places like Syria, Tunisia, Bahrain and Egypt are limited. The United States cannot manage these regional problems all by itself. Similarly, it cannot manage the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, particularly when America’s main ally actively refuses to take steps for peace that are in its own interests. If Israel wants to live in a permanent state of hostility with its neighbors, then so be it.
Secretary of State John Kerry is actively seeking solutions to the many problems facing the United States around the world. The Arab-Israeli dispute keeps getting lower on America’s list of global and strategic priorities; it has turned into a road to nowhere. Keep Pollard in jail or give him up, but, more importantly, the United States must move on from the Cold War era and leave these antagonists to their own devices and fate.
Photo: Israelis protest for the release of Jonathan Pollard. Credit: Reuters/Ammar Awad
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