Israel ‘had plan to use atomic bomb in 1967’

Details about the doomsday scenario shed new light on the fearful climate at the time, and could undermine Israel’s decades-long policy of nuclear ambiguity.

This photo taken on June 5, 1967 shows Israeli armoured forces in the Sinai Desert. AFP

JERUSALEM // Israel had a secret plan to detonate an atomic bomb in Egypt in the event that it faced defeat during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, a leading American think tank said on Monday, citing newly released documents.

The operation was never carried out, as Israel vanquished its enemies in six days.

But details about the doomsday scenario, in which Israel planned to set off a nuclear weapon atop a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula, shed new light on the fearful climate at the time. It also could undermine Israel’s decades-long policy of nuclear ambiguity.

The nuclear proliferation international history project of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington launched a website on Monday devoted to Operation Shimshon – the codename for the hastily arranged contingency plan of placing an improvised nuclear device in Sinai to be detonated upon the prime minister’s orders.

The operation’s name, Hebrew for Samson, invoked the biblical figure of great power and aimed to frighten Arab armies into quitting their offensive should Israel face what was feared to be an existential threat.

The new information was based on interviews with Yitzhak Yaakov, a retired brigadier general who in 1967 was the chief liaison between the Israeli military and the civilian defence industries, including those overseeing the nuclear project.

In a series of interviews in 1999 with Avner Cohen, a leading scholar of Israeli nuclear history, Yaakov detailed how he came up with the plans at his superiors’ urging.

“You’ve got an enemy, and he says he’s going to throw you to the sea. You believe him,” Yaakov said, according to a transcription of his taped interview with Mr Cohen.

“How can you stop him?” he asked. “You scare him. If you’ve got something you can scare him with, you scare him.”

The distance of the site from Egyptian population centres, and the relatively small size of the device, indicated that the plan was meant to send a message of deterrence, not inflict heavy damage.

In an accompanying essay, Mr Cohen concludes that Israel’s leadership did not seriously consider conducting a nuclear demonstration. But he said Gen Yaakov’s testimony was significant as it revealed that Israel had the capability to improvise a nuclear explosive device in June 1967.

But deputy minister Michael Oren, a former ambassador to the US and a historian who has written extensively about the 1967 war, said he was convinced it never happened.

Mr Oren said Mr Cohen’s paper relied on a single source. “It’s not sound history,” he said.

“Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of classified documents from the Six-Day War have been released,” he said, “and there is not even one shred that supports Avner Cohen’s version. If there was something, we would have found additional evidence.”

* Associated Press