How Britain helped Israel get the bomb

Newsnight reporter Michael Crick tells the story of how Britain helped Israel build the bomb - without telling the Americans.

By Michael Crick
BBC Newsnight

Documents uncovered by Newsnight in the British National Archives show how, in 1958, Britain agreed to sell Israel 20 tonnes of heavy water, a vital ingredient for the production of plutonium at Israel's top secret Dimona nuclear reactor in the Negev desert.

Robert McNamara, President John F Kennedy's defence secretary, has told Newsnight he is "astonished" at the revelation that Britain kept this secret from America.

In Wednesday's programme, Newsnight reveals how British officials decided it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards on the Israelis, and chose not to insist that Israel use the heavy water only for peaceful purposes.

Earlier the Americans had refused to supply heavy water to Israel without such safeguards.

Making money

The documents unearthed by Newsnight also show British officials decided not to tell Washington about it.

"On the whole I would prefer NOT to mention this to the Americans," concluded Donald Cape of the Foreign Office. When contacted by Newsnight this week, Mr Cape said he could remember nothing about the episode.

"I think it is quite extraordinary," says the former Conservative Defence and Foreign Office minister Lord Gilmour. "Whether the civil servants who were involved knew what they were doing, or whether they didn't, I don't know." He thinks they put Britain's economic interests first.

"One must assume they must have known... And what's more they seemed to have no idea of the political or indeed even the technical and foreign-policy implications of what they were doing. They just seemed to be concerned with making a bit of money."

Escaping criticism

Until now both France and Norway have been criticised for helping the Israelis develop the bomb, but Britain has escaped criticism.

Frank Barnaby, who worked on the British bomb project in the 1950s, and later debriefed the Israeli whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, says he had "no idea" that Britain was "involved" in supplying Israel with heavy water.

"Heavy water was crucial for Israel," he says. "Therefore it was a significant part of their nuclear programme."

More extraordinary, the archives suggest that the decision to sell heavy water was taken simply by civil servants, mainly in the Foreign Office and the UK Atomic Energy Authority.

Newsnight has found no evidence that ministers in the Macmillan Government were ever consulted about the sale, or even told about it.

Surplus

Michael Crick reading documents from the British National Archives
The papers show how officials presented the sale internally as a straight sale from Norway to Israel
The 20 tonnes of heavy water were part of a consignment which Britain bought from Norway in 1956, but the UK later decided this was surplus to requirements.

The papers in the National Archives in London show how officials presented the sale internally as a straight sale from Norway to Israel. But the minutes reveal that the heavy water was shipped from a British port in Israeli ships - half in June 1959 and half a year later.

In 1960 the Daily Express first exposed the Israelis' work at Dimona and the fact that Israel was probably making a bomb.

When Israel asked Britain for a further five tonnes of heavy water in 1961 the Foreign Office decided against a second transaction.

"I am quite sure we should not agree to this sale," advised Sir Hugh Stephenson of the Foreign Office. "The Israeli project is much too live an issue for us to get mixed up in it again," he wrote.

Mr McNamara, who became President Kennedy's defence secretary in 1961, has expressed his surprise to Newsnight that Britain didn't inform the Americans it had sold heavy water to Israel: "The fact that Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as any surprise... But that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to me.

"It's very surprising to me that we weren't told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British."

Michael Crick's report can be seen on Newsnight on Wednesday, 3 August at 10.30pm on BBC2.
------
With so many former soviet satellite republics now on their own and Iran in line, who's next to join this club?

Survivor of Hiroshima blast knew only that it was special

Denver man was Japanese soldier struggling in ruins

By Jolie Breeden, Rocky Mountain News
August 6, 2005

Hibakusha.

It is a word not often heard in America, not nearly so often as the other words associated with Hiroshima.

Atomic bomb. Nuclear fission. Radiation sickness. Utter devastation.

Hibakusha, translated literally from the Japanese, means bomb-affected people - survivors of the world's first nuclear holocaust.

Michio Taniwaki was one of them.

Taniwaki, 79, now lives in a small brick house in Denver, but 60 years ago, Hiroshima was his home.

Born in Hayward, Calif., in 1926, Taniwaki moved to the town of Susaki, Japan, when he was 6 years old.

Although the family enjoyed their American life, Taniwaki's father, the eldest son of a Susaki farmer, was called home to work the family plot when his father died.

It was there, among the rice paddies and tangerine trees, that Taniwaki grew up.

But by Aug. 6, 1945, Taniwaki was an unwilling soldier in the Japanese army, training in Hiroshima.

He'd been drafted seven months earlier; his American citizenship meant nothing to the Japanese government.

"I had to act like the Japanese and obey the Japanese," Taniwaki said. "I knew there was no way I could escape."

So Taniwaki left his family farm and traveled the 80 miles to Hiroshima. There, he trained as a soldier in a city that was becoming increasingly militarized.

At the time, everyone did some sort of work for the war effort, from training to resist enemy forces to destroying buildings to create a firebreak in case of bombing.

But Hiroshima wasn't bombed.

From his barracks near Hiroshima's main city park, Taniwaki could see the B-29 bombers as they ravaged the nearby city of Kure.

"We thought we are lucky we are not bombed yet," he said.

As it turned out, the reprieve in Hiroshima was not luck at all, but design.

The United States had declared a moratorium on incendiary bombs in areas that were potential targets for the A-bomb. They hoped to limit the damage to those cities to better study the effects of the new weapon. Taniwaki never accepted the good fortune as permanent, though.

"Air-raid alarms were going on pretty regularly," he said. "We knew bombs would be going off over our heads soon. It was only a matter of time."

He just didn't know what kind.

About 5:30 a.m. on Aug. 6, Taniwaki and 20 other soldiers were ordered to enlarge an air-raid shelter that was dug into a hill about 50 feet above the barracks. It would be their salvation.

The men worked without a break, digging the tunnel-like shelter with picks and shovels. Every so often, one of them would wheel a cart filled with the dirt they scraped from the cavern walls to the shelter's entrance. They worked that way for more than two hours.

"Then it happened," Taniwaki said.

At 8:15 a.m., one of the men had pushed the dirt-filled cart to the entrance. He saw a flash and was thrown backward into the retreat. Then he heard an explosion.

Deep in the shelter, Taniwaki heard it, too.

"It didn't sound that loud," he said.

Taniwaki and the other men calmly made their way out of the enclosure, which was about a mile and half from where the bomb detonated.

The sight that met them was astounding.

"We could see the entire barracks sitting in the rubble," said Taniwaki. "Some were still standing, leaning to the east. Probably a mile or more that we could see was flattened. Within a limited view, everything was gone."

Taniwaki knew immediately that Hiroshima had fallen victim to an extraordinary weapon.

"We could see that this was not something usual," he said. "We assumed that it was a new type of bomb. I thought 'Hiroshima is finished.' "

The men made their way down the hill in a silence that would last for several days.

"We didn't talk much," Taniwaki remembered. "Awestruck, I think is the word."

Taniwaki, as one of the few uninjured soldiers, was soon sent to help out in a hospital that had been set up at the Niho elementary school on the city's eastern edge.

There he watched a steady stream of walking wounded pour into the makeshift medical center that lacked bandages, doctors and oil for burns.

"So many of them died," Taniwaki said, shaking his head. "We carried them out and brought in a new patient."

Although he didn't sleep for the three days he was there, Taniwaki could do little for the badly burned victims, many of whom were women and children.

"Skin was falling off and there was nothing we could do," he said. "At first we tried not to look at them. But of course you can't avoid looking at them. Seeing them. Helping them."

As bad as the hospital duties were, Taniwaki's next assignment was worse. He collected the corpses from around the city, transporting them to temporary crematoriums.

"Nobody liked that job. If you tried to pick up the corpse, the skin peeled off and stuck to your hand," he said. Then he fell silent.

Taniwaki was later sent west through the broken city to stand guard against looters. At the bridge over Kyobashi River, "You could see from one end of the city to the other," he said. "There were no houses standing."

Throughout the ordeal, Taniwaki and others in Hiroshima remained in the dark about the specifics of their nightmare.

"Since before the war, we didn't have newspaper or radio," Taniwaki said. "Information trickled down to us. Atomic bomb. Radiation. These were words we heard much later."

At noon on Aug. 15, though, Taniwaki got all the information he needed when a scratchy radio transmission from Emperor Hirohito announced Japan's surrender.

"A lot of people thought 'No, this couldn't be true,' " he said. "A lot of people thought, even in August, that Japan was going to get the final victory."

Taniwaki was never one of them.

"I was 100 percent sure Japan was going to lose the war," he said.

Taniwaki eventually returned to his family, who was safe in Susaki. In 1953, he moved to California and then to Denver in 1960. He's led a quiet life since then, working in an appliance service center.

For the most part, Hiroshima is behind him, although, some years ago, he happened to meet George Caron, the tailgunner on the plane that dropped the bomb.

"While you were looking down from the top of the mushroom cloud, I was looking up from the bottom," Taniwaki told him.

He said he didn't expect any remorse from the gunner, and he didn't get any.

"He wasn't a bit apologetic," Taniwaki said.

Still, Taniwaki, doesn't waste time placing blame for bombing. For him, it's just a condition of war. Perhaps that's why he believes the same thing could happen again.

"If there's another war like World War II, I have no doubt that so many countries that possess nuclear weapons will use them," he said. "I think that's human nature."

"I think that's human nature."

Pakistan fires new cruise missile

Pakistan says it has fired its first cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear and conventional warheads.

The Babur missile has a range of 500km (310miles), a military spokesman said.

The launch comes days after Pakistan and neighbouring rival India agreed to give each other advance notice of future nuclear missile tests.

India had not been informed about Thursday's test because the agreement did not cover the type of missile fired on Thursday, the spokesman said.

Pakistan has joined a select group of countries which have the capability to design and develop cruise missiles,Pakistan military statement

The agreement "does not cover pre-notification of cruise missile tests," Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammed Naeem Khan told Associated Press.

There was no immediate reaction to the test from Delhi.

Cruise missiles are usually low-flying guided missiles.

"The technology enables the missile to avoid radar detection and penetrate undetected through any hostile defensive system," the Pakistan military said in a statement.

Routine

Army spokesman Major General Shaukat Sultan said Pakistan has joined the few countries "that can design and make cruise missiles".

Nuclear rivals India and Pakistan routinely test-fire their missiles.

In March, Pakistan successfully tested a long-range nuclear-capable missile - the Shaheen II, with a range of 2,000km (1,250 miles).

The two countries have twice veered close to war since tit-for-tat nuclear tests in 1998 - over Kashmir in 1999 and again in 2002.

Both countries have limited command-and-control structures, and neither has developed the technology to recall a nuclear-tipped missile fired in error.

India and Pakistan have recently agreed to give each other advance notice of future nuclear missile tests.