Numéro 60--- ÉTÉ 2007 - Vho

GAZETTE DU GOLFE ET DES BANLIEUES / 60 / ÉTÉ 2007
published by Ronen Bergman and Tom Segev, and reading Amit's book Head to Head,
illustrates that Dimona looked to him like a possible diplomatic lever for a breakthrough with
Egypt. Amit was not the only one who thought this. MK Zalman Abramov of the General
Zionists and a member of the Committee to Prevent the Nuclearization of the Middle East,
tried to promote similar diplomatic ideas. When I interviewed him at the beginning of the
1990s, he spoke about his perception back then that it was possible and necessary to trade the
Israeli nuclear option for the possibility of peace. He wrote personal memoranda dealing with
this matter to Eshkol and Eban, and met with them, but it was unclear to him whether either
ever did anything about it.
Further evidence for Eshkol's disquiet comes from another direction. In December 1966,
there was a serious industrial accident at the Dimona compound. One worker was killed, a
sensitive work area was contaminated and it took many weeks to purify and seal off the
damaged area. The accident shocked all those responsible for the nuclear project, including
the prime minister himself. Recently published American diplomatic documents show how the
U.S. ambassador to Israel at the time, Walworth Barbour, saw matters. In a letter Barbour sent
in February 1967 to a senior person in the State Department's Near East Division, he wrote that
he did not recall any other occasion when Eshkol had sounded so uncertain as to the future of
Dimona. Barbour recommended to his correspondent that perhaps, from Washington's
perspective, this was the time to move the idea of developing a large energy project, involving
nuclear desalinization of water in Israel, into practice. According to Barbour, in return, Israel
would place Dimona under inspection. In his letter Barbour writes that even six months earlier
he had been certain that the Israelis would never be persuaded to give up their option of a
nuclear weapon in return for the desalinization project, but he believed a number of new
elements had entered the picture of late. He went on to say that one could sense a slackening
of the determination to leave Nasser unwitting as to Israel's nuclear intentions and that the
Israelis' awareness of the dangers inherent in this mode of action had become clear to him in
a number of recent conversations with the prime and foreign ministers. He also wrote that his
personal impression was that Dimona was not working at full-steam and that the most promising
arrangement available on the horizon was the possibility that Israel would open Dimona to a
significant number of non-Israeli scientists for inspection. He added that Abba Eban was
thinking along those lines, which was significant, and that at least one trial balloon had been
sent up recently in that direction.
Another piece of indirect evidence shedding light on Eshkol's hesitations arose in an
interview I conducted with Floyd Culler, who headed the American team visiting Dimona in
the late 1960s. Culler also headed the team that visited Dimona in April 1967, the last visit
before the war broke out. During this visit the team was officially accompanied by Professor
Amos de-Shalit, the scientific director of the Weizmann Institute. On the last day of the visit,
after a reception at de-Shalit's home in Rehovot, the host insisted on personally taking Culler
back to his hotel in Tel Aviv. In the conversation between the two, de-Shalit brought up a
number of suggestions Culler later described as the detailed thoughts of a physicist on how to
prevent a nuclear Middle East. Although de-Shalit described his suggestions as "personal
thoughts," Culler was convinced that the suggestions were a "trial balloon" launched on
Eshkol's behalf, and he transmitted them to Washington as such.
From the little Culler was prepared to say on the subject, it was obvious to me that de-
Shalit had made it very clear to him that now was the time to act in order to prevent a nuclear
Middle East. Unfortunately, added Culler, within weeks the crisis in the Middle East erupted,
and the nuclear issue lost its relevance overnight. Even decades later, Culler still related to the
conversation with great delicacy, and he refused to go into detail.
Crossing the threshold
We are coming to May 1967. The standard Israeli narrative until now has never
discussed the war's nuclear dimension. The memoirs of Eshkol's military secretary, Colonel
Yisrael Lior, which were edited by Eitan Haber in the book Today War Will Break Out (1988),
for the first time revealed the aerial photographs taken by parties hostile to Israel over "strategic
targets" during the waiting period, and discussed the impact these flights had on the way
Israeli politicians perceived the crisis. In two reports in the early 1990s in Haaretz, Aluf Benn
was, I believe, the first to say that the Six-Day War also had a nuclear dimension, citing the
somewhat opaque remarks of the founder of Rafael (Armaments Development Authority),
Munia Mardor, about that "fateful weapons system my people have succeeded in bringing to
operational readiness."
From Gluska, we learned how two high-altitude aerial photography flights over Dimona,
on May 17 and 26, were critical for the IDF and the government's understanding of the
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