Gilinsky's letter to the editor was published in the New York Review of Books on 4 May. Notes have been deleted for space. Walid Khalidi wrote the following introduction for JPS:
When Avner Cohen, an Israeli living in the United States, published his Israel and the Bomb in 1998, a Ha'Aretz reviewer described the book as a ““bombshell,”” while the Israeli historian Tom Segev declared that it would necessitate ““the rewriting of Israeli history.”” Although the book was based on documents mostly in the public domain in the United States, Israeli intelligence was so angered by Cohen's defiance of its taboo on matters nuclear that it subjected him to fifty hours of interrogation upon his first visit to Israel following publication. Cohen's book has now come out in a paperback edition, reviewed by Israeli writer Amos Elon in the New York Review of Books (15 January 2004). This review elicited, in its turn, the letter published here by Victor Gilinsky, formerly both a member of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and head of the physical sciences department at Rand Corporation.
Those who have not read Cohen's book may want to know what it contained, despite the significant omissions pointed out in Gilinsky's letter. Basically, Israel and the Bomb tells how, with the exception of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, Israel was able to win the acquiescence of successive U.S. administrations to Israel's introduction into the Middle East of nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which according to recent estimates now comprise up to two hundred nuclear bombs and thirty-five tactical thermonuclear devices with the long-range missiles to deliver them.
Already by 1960 (thanks to French help, in retaliation for Egyptian president Gamal `Abd al-Nasser's support of the Algerian revolution) Israel was well on its way to nuclear weapons capacity. Christian Herter, secretary of state in the outgoing Eisenhower administration, briefed John Kennedy on the subject on his first day in office in 1961.
An interesting tidbit in Cohen's book is that Israel's nuclear program in the 1960s was common knowledge in Israeli and American Jewish business circles——Israeli businessmen having been solicited for funds for the Dimona reactor, with American Jews led by Abe Feinberg, a Democratic activist (chairman of the America Bank and Trust Co. and a trustee of the Weizmann Institute of Science), lending a hand.
For the first two years after Kennedy was inaugurated, Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion successfully stalled increasingly persistent U.S. demands that Dimona undergo twice yearly inspections——then deemed the minimum for meaningful inspection. By May 1963, Kennedy's patience was running out, and he sent Ben-Gurion a sharp letter warning that U.S. commitment to Israel would be ““seriously jeopardized”” unless Israel was more forthcoming on the nuclear issue. One month later, Ben-Gurion resigned his premiership, handing it over to the more pliant Levi Eshkol whom he despised and expected to give in to Kennedy. In November 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. Ironically, it was Kennedy who authorized the first U.S. delivery of heavy weapons——the Hawk missiles——to Israel, and these ended up deployed around the Dimona reactor.
Thenceforth, it was plain sailing for Israel——Lyndon Johnson not being too particular about nuclear (especially Israeli) proliferation. Presently the regulating doctrine in U.S.-Israeli nuclear discourse became that of ““ambiguity”” or ““opacity,”” whereby Israel declares it will not be the ““first”” to introduce nuclear WMDs in the Middle East, even though both Tel Aviv and Washington know only too well that it has already done so. In return for this Israeli stance, the United States provides Israel with massive infusions of conventional weapons to ““dissuade”” it from resorting to its nuclear arsenal——an idyllic case for Israel of having its cake and eating it too. This charade continues to this day, even as the United States went into Iraq to prevent its acquisition of WMDs and is breathing fire and brimstone against Iran's nuclear intentions——themselves a response to Israel's nuclear arsenal.