The Initiation Phase
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was obsessed and driven by the vision that a nuclear capability would be the answer to Israel’s security predicament. He considered the Arab-Israeli conflict to be deep and enduring, and, consequently, he believed that the resolution of the conflict could come only after the Arabs were compelled to accept the existence of the state of Israel. Until that time, Israel would have to rely on its sword. Furthermore, only technology, he believed, could provide Israel the qualitative edge necessary to overcome its inferiority in population, resources, and size. As Shimon Peres (his aide at the time) once put it, “Ben-Gurion believed that science could compensate us for what Nature has denied us.”[3] This phrase is, in essence, the whole rationale for Israel’s nuclear project.
Two other men were instrumental in making Ben-Gurion’s nuclear vision a reality. The first was Professor Ernst David Bergmann, an organic chemist by training, who was Ben-Gurion’s close scientific advisor. In 1952, Bergmann founded the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) as the vehicle through which to realize this nuclear vision. The second was Shimon Peres, then young director-general of the Ministry of Defense, who was the administrator-politician who promoted that vision. As the architect of the “special relations” between Israel and France in the mid-to-late 1950s, Peres was the man behind the Fr… >>>
