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.
]]>Roger Simon, blogging at Pajamas Media, claims to be quoting an article published in the Israeli daily Maariv:
…. workers at the Dimona reactor who submitted VISA requests to visit the United States for ongoing university education in Physics, Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering — have all been rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor. This is a new policy decision of the Obama administration, since there never used to be an issue with the reactor’s workers from study in the USA, and till recently, they received VISAs and studied in the USA.
Simon goes on to infer that, according to the Maariv article, “Israeli defense officials are stating these workers have no criminal records in the U.S. or Israel and have been singled out purely because of their place of employment.”
Nestled in Simon’s (or an uncredited source’s) “exclusive Pajamas Media translation” is the revelation that the English version Simon is quoting what he admits “is from a Google translation that I’ve tried to fix up a little bit.”
A little bit? Let’s play “Simon Says” and compare his (or his source’s) efforts to what Maariv writer Uri Binder actually wrote:
Simon says:
NRG/Maariv reports today that workers at the Dimona reactor who submitted VISA requests to visit the United States for ongoing University education in Physics, Chemistry and Nuclear Engineering — have all been rejected, specifically because of their association with the Dimona reactor. This is a new policy decision of the Obama administration, since there never used to be an issue with the reactor’s workers from study in the USA, and till recently, they received VISAs and studied in the USA.
Israeli Defense Officials have stated that these reactor researches have no criminal background in Israel or in the USA, and yet they are being singled out purely because of their place of employment at the reactor.
In point of fact, the Maariv article in the original Hebrew (English translation courtesy of and copyright by Israel News Today, used by permission here and for subsequent block quotes) opens:
The Americans are toughening their behavior toward the Nuclear Research Center Negev (NRCN) in Dimona. NRCN workers say that while the Americans are behaving in a conciliatory and non-aggressive way regarding the Iranian nuclear program, President Obama’s people have chosen to behave in a humiliating manner toward a country that is friendly toward them.
NRCN officials said yesterday that Obama’s government has imposed restrictions and toughened its behavior toward them, as has never happened before in relations between the two countries. For decades, NRCN employees have traveled to universities in the United States for advanced professional training in physics, chemistry and nuclear engineering. In order to study at those universities, the NRCN researchers had to request entry visas for the United States, as any Israeli citizen must. Yet recently, several of them encountered humiliating treatment and were refused visas, while their only crime has been that they are NRCN employees. According to security officials, the people in question are researchers with clean records who have never been in any trouble with the law either in Israel or in the United States, so the new manner in which they are being treated constitutes a severe offense against them and their families.
So, at the outset it is obvious that:
1. Binder’s Maariv article is part of a larger discourse of grievance emanating from Israel about Iran, and what appears (to Israelis) to be President Obama’s harsh treatment of Israel in sharp contrast to his conciliatory and gentle treatment of Iran. (Iranians don’t quite see it that way.)
2. Simon asserts not only that all Dimona workers who have requested visas to study in the US have been turned down, but also that they have been refused visas explicitly because they worked at the Dimona nuclear facility. In Blau’s original article in Maariv, he doesn’t elaborate on what the alleged “humiliating treatment,” consisted of, nor does he provide any hint as to the number of Dimona employees who requested study visas, how many received them and how many had their visa requests denied. (Do consular officials routinely provide a reason why a visa has been denied?)
The original Hebrew is kamah mey’hem, which translates as “a few” or “some” of them. Toward the end of the article, Professor Ze’ev Alfasi, the director of the nuclear engineering department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, is quoted as saying, “Some of the people did not receive visas to the United States because they are employees of the Nuclear Research Center.” Some, not all. (How Professor Alfasi is privy to US State Dept. deliberations concerning visa issuance is not clear.)
3. Simon’s translation claims that (unnamed) “Defense officials” have attributed the rejection of the visa applications to the applicants working for NRCN. In Binder’s article, “security officials” attest to the fact that the applicants have never run afoul of the law either in Israel or the US. It is not clear whether it is these (unnamed) officials or Binder himself who believe(s) that this, in and of itself, automatically entitles the individuals in question, and their families, to US entry visas.
4. Also interesting is that Simon’s headline refers to the victims of visa denial as “scientists,” whereas in Binder’s article, they are merely “workers.” (Perhaps they are technicians at the level of Mordechai Vanunu?) Nowhere in the Maariv piece is the word “scientist” used.
Most remarkably, Simon , the right wing blogosphere, and the hysterical rantings of the Republican Jewish Coalition, as well as the few progressives to have caught this story (Paul Woodward, Juan Cole), seem to have missed the significance of the larger and far more germane issue raised in Binder’s article. Dimona workers are objecting: the US apparently has not been providing some of the dual use (civilian and military) nuclear technological equipment to Israel that it wants. Exactly how long this has been the case is not clear, although Binder tries to exculpate the Bush administration. This has forced Israel to procure this technology from (gasp!) France.
According to officials who are familiar with the details, attempts to purchase certain components from the Americans have also encountered difficulties, with some of the items under a de facto embargo. To put it mildly, officials at the nuclear center are not pleased with the tougher treatment, which did not take place during President Bush’s term.
According to Professor Alfasi,“The United States is not selling anything nuclear to the Nuclear Research Center, and that includes everything. For example, radiation detectors for nuclear research are purchased in France because the Americans do not sell to people of the Nuclear Research Center.”
Even more offensive and outrageous to Israelis is that “The Americans have asked for a detailed report on the purpose of some of the items that they wish to buy from the United States.” Professor Alfasi complains: “The Americans want to know what every item of equipment is used for.”
The Maariv article ends, as it began, with Iran. Alfasi says peevishly, “I don’t know whether they [the US] will sell to Iran what they’ve been refusing to sell to us.” According to Binder, “Officials of the Nuclear Research Center refused to comment.”
The Maariv article concludes rather oddly with what appears to be a stinging indictment of “the upper echelons of the security establishment” who apparently are not as upset by the US’s alleged perfidy as anonymous retiree thinks they ought to be:
A retired employee of the Nuclear Research Center said yesterday, “I don’t understand it. Why are the upper echelons of the security establishment silent when our best friend is working against us so blatantly and behaving leniently toward the makers of nuclear terror? The whole world is seeing the circus that the Iranian regime has created for the United States.”
Is it possible that President Obama really is serious about curbing nuclear proliferation–for Iran, for the US, and, unthinkably, even for Israel. Israelis love non-proliferation as long as his target is Iran, but get awfully upset if the POTUS–or anyone in his administration–dares to challenge the Israeli presumption that its own nuclear programs, and the people who work for them, are exempt from American and international scrutiny. The “top echelons” of the Israeli may be the first to have gotten the message, or they may be allowing their underlings to grab the headlines and speak for them.
Even more to the point, what is Obama’s message to France, who, as a nuclear state which is party to the NPT, has pledged to provide nuclear technology only to non-nuclear states which have signed the NPT? Israel has never signed the NPT, either as a non-nuclear or nuclear state. Obama may have finally noticed that the NPT actually bars support for Israel’s nuclear program. The French have been turning a blind eye to the NPT when it comes to Israel, apparently providing anything the US won’t. France, after all, was the source of Israel’s nuclear infrastructure back in the 1950s and 60′s. France often claims (with a wink) to have been duped by the Israelis into providing their nuclear know-how.
What about now?
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