CIA gamma-ray detectors hidden along the Bosporus picked them up as they transited the waterway. That knowledge, in turn, led to Richard Nixon’s global alert of U.S. forces.
Now, in their brilliantly illuminated tunnels, Israel’s technicians prepared those bombs once again. In the control room of each tunnel, a high-speed Teleprinter gave the setting for each bomb’s pressure detonator, fixing a few for ground-level burst, ordering the majority primed to explode at medium or high altitude to maximize their destructive radius.
As each was readied it was fitted into a special trolley designed to carry four fully armed bombs. The first trolleys were rolling down the corridors just eight minutes and forty-three seconds after the klaxon’s first warning wail.
The atomic bombs speeding toward their elevators represented the final fruits of a program almost as old as the state of Israel itself. The man who had originally proposed it was Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first President and a brilliant scientist whose work in naval gunpowder for the British in 1914 had helped open Palestine for Jewish immigration with the Balfour Declaration. Over the objections of a number of his colleagues, David BenGurion, the warrior-philosopher who presided over the state in its formative years, had committed Israel to the nuclear program in the early 1950s.
Israel’s first allies in the search were the French, embarked in defiance of their Anglo-American allies on a nuclear-arms program of their own. Cut off from access to computer technology by the Americans, the French turned to the minds of the Weizmann Institute outside Tel Aviv for help in the interminable calculations the bomb project required. The Israelis also introduced the French to a technique they had developed to produce heavy water. In return, the French gave the Israelis access to their program and let them participate in the Sahara tests of their first bomb design, a gesture which relieved Israel of the need to test herself. Finally, in late 1957, the French agreed to sell her an experimental reactor fueled with natural uranium, a reactor that both nations’ scientists knew could one day be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.
BenGurion himself chose the site for his atomic installation, a desolate strip of desert easily isolated and protected twenty miles south of his home kibbutz of Sde Boker. It was called Dimona, the name of a Biblical town that had existed there in the time of the Nabataeans. When Israeli engineers moved in to prepare the center, the government decided to conceal its real purpose by labeling it a textile plant. Thereafter, as the reactor’s dome gradually began to rise above the desert floor, it was referred to by Israeli cognoscenti as “BenGurion’s pants factory.”
A year later, the arrival of Charles de Gaulle in power in France in May 1958 put an abrupt halt to FrancoIsraeli nuclear cooperation. For the nationalist de Gaulle, France’s nuclear program was no one’s business but France’s. Israel found herself with the theoretical knowledge she needed to build a bomb and, until Dimona was ready, nothing to build it with. She found what she needed in the unlikeliest of locations, a shabby factory complex on the outskirts of Apollo, Pennsylvania, thirtyfive miles northeast of Pittsburgh on Route 66. There the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC)-found in 1957 by Dr. Zalman Shapiromade nuclear fuel and recovered highly enriched uranium from scraps of leftover fuel from the U.S. nuclearsubmarine program. Between 1960 and 1967 an unbelievable 572 pounds of highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium disappeared from NUMEC. Well over half of it, the CIA later discovered, at least enough for a score of bombs, wound up in the Negev.
That NUMEC uranium fueled Israel’s first generation of atomic bombs. The second generation was made from plutonium separated out of the burnt fuel of the Dimona reactor. Those efforts had left Israel, by the end of the seventies, far more than just the seventh nuclear power on the globe. The bombs rising out of their desert hiding places constituted part of a nuclear strike force which some intelligence agencies rated as good as England’s and superior to China’s.
“Stop here. I want to get some cigarettes.” Yusi Avidar, the director of military intelligence, waved his driver to a halt on Jerusalem’s Jaffa Road. He got out and walked to the tobacco shop just around the corner, where he bought a pack of Europa cigarettes.
When he came out, instead of returning to his car, he drifted up the street to the public telephone booth thirty yards away. No one recognized him there, fumbling through his address book for a telephone number. No one ever recognized Israeli intelligence directors; their faces and functions were carefully concealed from the public.
Avidar was not in fact looking for a number; he knew by heart the number he was thinking of calling. His hand trembled as he lit one of the cigarettes he had just bought. His face paled, and, standing there, pretending to study his address book, he felt his knees shake. His hand, a coin between his fingers, rose toward the phone. It stopped halfway. He turned to leave the booth, then stopped again. Swiftly, in one continuous movement designed almost to reach its culmination before any other impulse could stop him, he dropped the coin into the slot and dialed the number.
Forty miles away on the Tel Aviv sea front, the telephone rang in the office of the second political counselor of the U.S. Embassy.
Three blasts of a siren almost shook the halfdozen young men out of the leather easy chairs in which they sprawled watching closed-circuit television. Three blasts was the signal for an air-to-ground mission for those pilots of the Israeli Air Force; two would have signaled an air-to-air alert.
Grabbing their helmets and orange life jackets, they ran out of their ready room, across a graveled courtyard to the one-story bungalow from which their squadron was commanded. As they did, the first assembled nuclear bombs were already being fitted into their Phantom jets hidden in concrete abutments slotted into the desert floor so carefully they were practically invisible.
The pre-attack briefing was short. It concentrated on the radio frequencies they would employ in an emergency, the codes they would have to follow with total precision to be sure their assault was perfectly coordinated.
As one of the senior airmen in Israel, the squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Giora Lascov, was assigned to the huge Uba bin Nafi Air Base, formerly the U.S. Air Force’s Wheelus Base outside Tripoli, as his target.
Like three quarters of Israel’s pilots, the thirty-fiveyear-old Lascov was a kibbutznik. In his fifteen years as a member of the elite of Israel’s armed forces, he had fought in two wars and accumulated over three thousand hours of flight time. So highly trained, so programmed was he to respond to a crisis that the sudden revelation that this was not an exercise and that he would, in a very brief time, be dropping a twenty-kiloton nuclear bomb on an enemy target barely jarred his composure.
Because they had the greatest distance to cover, he and his wing man had the first launch. As he rose to head to the jeep outside waiting to speed him down the flight line to his Phantom, the full enormity of what he was about to do struck Lascov.
He turned to look back at the young pilots of his squadron. Their faces reflected the horror that had suddenly engulfed him. He stood there trying to find in his mind some words, some phrase, to leave his men. Then he understood that there were no words to fit so terrible a moment. Silently, Lascov turned to his jeep. Seconds later, he was racing toward his Phantom.
It was 9:52. Exactly thirty-four minutes had elapsed since General Dorit had stepped out of the Cabinet Room and picked up the phone linking him to “The Hole.”