© David Rubinger/Government Press OfficeAn Egyptian transport burning after a direct hit from an Israeli tank during the Six Day War, June 5, 1967.
One the eve of the Six Day War, with the country surrounded by enemies and unsure of its future, Israel developed a "doomsday" plan to detonate an atomic bomb in Egypt's Sinai Peninsula as a warning to the Arabs, The New York Times reported Saturday.
The report was based on an interview conducted by leading Israeli nuclear scholar Avner Cohen with retired IDF brigadier general Itzhak Yaakov, who reportedly oversaw the plan.
"It's the last secret of the 1967 war," Cohen told the paper.
The full interview is set to be published Monday, as the region marks the 50th anniversary of the war in which Israel defeated the combined Arab armies in just six days.
According to Yaakov, who oversaw weapons development for the Israel military and gave details of the plan to Cohen in 1999 and 2000 interviews, Israel was deeply fearful ahead of the war.
"Look, it was so natural," Yaakov said, according to the Times, which quoted a transcription of a taped interview. "You've got an enemy, and he says he's going to throw you to the sea. You believe him."
"How can you stop him?" Yaakov asked. "You scare him. If you've got something you can scare him with, you scare him."
Comment: Except that Israel's top military never really believed that. It was propaganda to keep the masses in line.
In an interview published in Le Monde on 28 February 1968, Israeli Chief of Staff Rabin said this: "I do not believe that Nasser wanted war. The two divisions which he sent into Sinai on 14 May would not have been enough to unleash an offensive against Israel. He knew it and we knew it."
On 14 April 1971, a report in the Israeli newspaper Al-Hamishmar contained the following statement by Mordecai Bentov, a member of the wartime national government. "The entire story of the danger of extermination was invented in every detail and exaggerated to justify the annexation of new Arab territory."
On 4 April 1972, the Israeli newspaper Ma'ariv contained the following statement by General Haim Bar-Lev, Rabin's predecessor as chief of staff. "We were not threatened with genocide on the eve of the Six Day War, and we had never thought of such a possibility."
In the same Israeli newspaper on the same day, General Ezer Weizmann, Chief of Operations during the war and a nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was quoted as saying the following. "There was never any danger of annihilation. This hypothesis has never been considered in any serious meeting."
In the spring of 1972, General Matetiyahu Peled, Chief of Logistical Command during the war and one of 12 members of Israel's General Staff, addressed a political literary club in Tel Aviv. He said: "The thesis according to which the danger of genocide hung over us in June 1967, and according to which Israel was fighting for her very physical survival, was nothing but a bluff which was born and bred after the war."
And in a radio debate Peled said: "Israel was never in real danger and there was no evidence that Egypt had any intention of attacking Israel. Israeli intelligence knew that Egypt was not prepared for war."
In the same programme General Chaim Herzog (a former Director of Military Intelligence, future Israeli Ambassador to the UN and President of his state) said: "There was no danger of annihilation. Neither Israeli headquarters nor the Pentagon - as the memoirs of President Johnson proved - believed in this danger."
On 3 June 1972 Peled was even more explicit in an article of his own for Le Monde. He wrote:"All those stories about the huge danger we were facing because of our small territorial size, an argument expounded once the war was over, have never been considered in our calculations. While we proceeded towards the full mobilisation of our forces, no person in his right mind could believe that all this force was necessary to our 'defence' against the Egyptian threat. This force was to crush once and for all the Egyptians at the military level and their Soviet masters at the political level. To pretend that the Egyptian forces concentrated on our borders were capable of threatening Israel's existence does not only insult the intelligence of any person capable of analysing this kind of situation, but is primarily an insult to the Israeli army."
Yaakov, who died in 2013 at age 87, detailed in the interview with Cohen how Israel developed a plan code-named "Shimshon," or Samson, to have helicopters and commandos fly an atomic device to a mountain top site about 12 miles from an Egyptian military complex at Abu Ageila.
"The plan, if activated by order of the prime minister and military chief of staff, was to send a small paratrooper force to divert the Egyptian Army in the desert area so that a team could lay preparations for the atomic blast," the report said.
"Two large helicopters were to land, deliver the nuclear device and then create a command post in a mountain creek or canyon. If the order came to detonate, the blinding flash and mushroom cloud would have been seen throughout the Sinai and Negev deserts, and perhaps as far away as Cairo."
Israel has never acknowledged having nuclear weapons, maintaining a policy of so-called nuclear ambiguity, neither publicly confirming nor denying the existence of an atomic arsenal. However, several top US officials have seemed to confirm it, most recently former secretary of state Colin Powell who wrote in a leaked private email that he believed Israel has some 200 nuclear weapons.
The Israeli Embassy in Washington declined to comment on the report or on Yaakov's role, The New York Times said.
© Flash90/US National Security ArchiveA photo from the 1960s of the nuclear facility outside Dimona
On Monday, the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington — where Cohen is a fellow — is releasing on a special website a series of documents related to the Israeli atomic plan.
In the transcripts, Yaakov describes a helicopter flight he made to the site with Israel Dostrovsky, the first director-general of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission, that had to be aborted after the Egyptians scrambled fighter jets.
© Agence France-PresseThis file photo taken on June 5, 1967 shows Israeli airforce Dassault Mirage III fighters flying over the Sinai Peninsula at the Israeli-Egyptian border on the first day of the Six Day War.
As it turned out, Israel's victory was swift and decisive and there was no need for any doomsday plan, but Yaakov still believed Israel should have gone ahead with it and openly declared its nuclear prowess.
"I still think to this day that we should have done it," he told Cohen, who is the author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret.
© James Martin Center for Nonproliferation StudiesProfessor Avner Cohen
Yaakov was acquitted of the main charge but found guilty of the unauthorized handing over of secret information, Haaretz said, noting that he received a two-year suspended sentence.
© YouTube screenshotYitzhak Yaakov
According to Cohen, he promised Yaakov he would find the right time to publish the information and now, on the 50th anniversary, he believed the time was ripe.
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