Does Israel Really Have a Thermonuclear

Weapon?
And did the Pentagon really just declassify a document admitting knowledge of this?

BY JEFFREY LEWIS-MARCH 31, 2015

We all know Israel has the bomb, but does it have

the hydrogenbomb?
The idea that Israels nuclear arsenal might comprise thermonuclear
weapons has long been a subject of discussion. It popped back in the
popular conscience a few weeks ago when Grant Smith who runs an
organization called the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy that has
some viewsabout Israel that I find pretty awful released a redacted

version of a 1987 report published by the Institute for Defense Analyses

(IDA). Smith had sued to get the document, then posted it online claiming it
was confirmation of Israels advanced nuclear weapons with
advanced meaning thermonuclear weapons.
The notion that Israel is stockpiling thermonuclear weapons wasnt quite
enough for some people. Roger Mattson, a former staffer for the old U.S.
Atomic Energy Commission who has long accused Israel of stealing uranium
from the United States, was quoted as saying, I am struck by the degree of
cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US.
Immediately, RT ran with the headline: US helped Israel with Hbomb. Iranian media gleefully followed.
At some level, I wanted to ignore all this. I dont feel like giving free
publicity to Grant Smiths campaign, and if you are the sort who reads RT or
PressTV.ir well, I cant talk you out of being crazy.

But now, William Greider has written a blog post for the Nation. And while I
dont normally bother with the Nation either, Tom Gross followed with
abizarre piece in the Weekly Standard, positing a sinister hand behind a
pattern of carefully controlled leaking of information presumably intended
to destroy Israel and, verily, Western Civilization as we know it. Reporters
are calling me. And my friends are sharing this stuff on Facebook.
And if there is one rule in life, it is this: Do not f*ck with Jeffreys Facebook
news feed.

So, let me tell you what the document actually says, with context and
explanations. Spoiler alert: It bears no resemblance to anything these
people have described.

The document in question is called IDA Memorandum Report M-317, Critical

Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations. It is a 1987 report by
Edwin S. Townsley of IDA and Clarence A. Robinson of a defense contractor
called LTI. Its not a top-secret Pentagon assessment, its a fucking trip
report.
It is an interesting and valuable trip report, yes, one that does shed a tiny
bit of light on the state of Israels nuclear weapons program in 1987. But it
happens to say the exact opposite of what you might think. It casts doubt
on the notion that Israel has thermonuclear weapons. But I am getting
ahead of myself; first things first.

For starters, the document is not classified. I happen to have a copy like,
literally, a photocopy of the section relating to Israel sitting on my shelf.
This is the same portion that Grant Smith sued to get. Here is a picture of
the front. Notice that there are no classification markings.

Photo credit: Jeffrey Lewis

It does not confirm that Israel possesses nuclear weapons nor that the

United States knows this to be true. (For the record, I think the United
States should declassify the fact that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. I
think this especially since the CIA declassified Special National Intelligence
Estimate 4-1-74 in 2008, which states, We believe that Israel already has
produced and stockpiled a small number of fission weapons. But that was
the subject of a previous column.) IDA Memorandum Report M-317 merely
records the informed opinion of a team that visited certain Israeli facilities.
But more on that in a few hundred words.
Now, I will admit the FOIA process is screwed up. And adding lawyers to a
conversation rarely helps. In this case, it seems the U.S. governments

lawyers were concerned about a provision in U.S. law that would allow the
foreign countries that provided information in the report, including Israel, to
review the document before its release. But looking through the court
papersthat Smith filed (pro se, I might add), he seems like a real piece of
work. I cant approve of IDA stonewalling the public when it comes to a
document like this, but let me put it this way: Id like to express my
disapproval in person to whoever told Smith to piss off. Over a beer and Im
buying.
Look, I dont know what the rules are for using the IDA library, but I am
familiar with doing research in the national security field. A polite person
with a decent reason can get a copy of this report one way or another or
could have, until the lawsuit started. The document has been cited plenty of
times in the literature, starting with a story in the New York Times by
Michael Gordon in 1989. The report has been circulating for years. And, like
I said, a copy landed on my shelf. (For those interested, Ive posted a brief
history of press mentions of the report online at ArmsControlWonk.com.)
But I can understand why no one would share with someone who just wants
to make trouble, including trouble for the nice folks at IDA who dont need
this crap over a nearly 30-year-old report that is being completely
misrepresented.

There is no conspiracy at play here. Grant Smith has been suing to acquire
the document because he claimed it showed American affiliates of Israeli

entities engaged in clandestine nuclear weapons research and

development. I dont think it shows that at all. Tom Gross wonders why the
sections not related to Israel are redacted. Read the court documents,
genius.

Smith wanted the document as soon as possible and didnt want to wait for
the sections not relating to Israel. Hes a man on a (very weird) mission. Ive
got the full text of the summaries for the other countries. Trust me, no one
is hiding anything.

Most importantly, IDA Memorandum Report M-317, Critical Technology

Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations does not demonstrate, in any way,
shape, or form that the United States assisted Israel in developing a
thermonuclear weapon or even that Israel has such weapons. This is a
completely incompetent reading of the document. It simply does not say
this. Read the damn text.
The report is just a review of the technology base in Israel and NATO
countries that might be relevant to what was then called the Strategic
Defense Initiative (SDI) you know, Ronald Reagans Star Wars or what we
now call missile defense.Its a trip report, with Israel as the big
destination. Hey, guess why the Pentagon dropped a bunch of cash on IDA
to sample the local falafel? The United States and Israel had signed
a memorandum of understanding regarding Israeli participation in the SDI

program on May 6, 1986. (The contents are still secret, but Uzi Eilam has
a nice memoir about U.S.-Israel missile defense cooperation during that
period.) The Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO), the forerunner
to todays Missile Defense Agency, would later develop the Arrow missile
defense interceptor with Israeli Aircraft Industries (IAI), followed by other
nifty things like Rafaels Iron Dome.
How did the Pentagon figure out whether IAI was the best partner for a
missile defense interceptor? Well, how would you figure it out? Youd send a
bunch of nerds to make some visits. Thats precisely what the Defense
Department did contracting with IDA and LTI to send a team to Israel
(and Europe) to assess the state of Israeli (and European) technology in the
then-cutting-edge area of strategic defense.
In the Nation article, Greider exoticizes the teams report back to HQ,
writing that The language is densely technological and probably beyond
anyone (like myself) who is not a physicist or engineer. No, its just boring.
Here is a page showing Hebrew Universitys Wiggler Less Free Electron
Laser. This has nothing to do with nuclear weapons, and trust me, its superduper boring.

Source: IDA Memorandum, Report M-317

The document is really not about nuclear weapons at all, but rather
technologies related to SDI. Below is the overall chart assessing Israels
capabilities for strategic defense, by institution. A check mark means the
Israeli capability is excellent, implicitly suggesting an interesting area to
propose cooperation. There is a lot of jargon, but these are all non-nuclear
capabilities with one interesting exception that is causing all the hubbub.

Key to the acronyms: C3: Command, control, and communications; ATBM:

Anti-tactical ballistic missiles; SATKA: Surveillance, acquisition, tracking,
and kill assessment; DEW: Directed energy weapons; KEW: Kinetic energy
weapons; BM/C3: Ballistic missile/command, control, and communications.
Source: IDA Memorandum, Report M-317

See anything marked thermonuclear bombs? No? Exactly.

Now, look at directed energy weapons, or DEW. This is where things get a
little tricky. Even as late as 1987, SDIO was still looking at a nuclearpumped X-ray laser as a possible directed energy weapon a nuclear
explosion in space that would generate a laser to zap incoming Soviet
ballistic missiles. This was a really dumb idea, but Edward Teller liked it. The
nuclear-pumped X-ray laser was a fancy sort of thermonuclear bomb. Teller

used to call it a third generation nuclear weapon. (If you are interested in
reading more about the X-ray laser during this period, I really recommend
Bill Broads Star Warriors or maybe Frances FitzGeralds Way Out There in
the Blue.)
Stay with me. In order to assess whether Israel might be able to develop a
nuclear-pumped X-ray laser, the team needed to make some assessment of
Israels technical ability to manufacture thermonuclear weapons. The
answer, based on Israeli computer codes, was no.

When the IDA/LTI team visited Israels Soreq Nuclear Research Center, this
is part of what they concluded about Israels ability to develop the nuclearpumped X-ray lasers:
[The Israelis] are still hampered in being able to design and
produce fusion weapons or other more complicated devices
utilizing fusion and fission in the same configuration. As far as
nuclear technology is concerned the Israelis are roughly where the
U.S. [was] in the fission weapon field in about 1955 to 1960. It
should be noted that the Israelis are developing the kind of codes
which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes
which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and
macroscopic level.

However, it is doubtful they have the codes to completely design

such devices, as they involve more exotic radiation transport and

are multidimensional. The Israelis do not yet have the capability to
carry out these kinds of calculations.

To put it simply, the IDA/LTI team including R. Norris Keeler, the team
member who had run Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory concluded
that Israel would not likely be able to develop a nuclear pumped X-ray laser
given the state of their computer codes. (This is elsewhere in the report,
stated explicitly, though in jargon: Lack of radiation hydro-capability and
nuclear pumping limits project.) If anything, the report notes that Israel
would not be a suitable technical partner for cooperation in this area of SDI
because it couldnt make H-bombs.

Greider says the report describes a technological marriage, but in fact the
analogy is more like a chaperoned prom date. And, at least on directed
energy weapons, there was not likely to be any heavy petting. Soreq was
not identified as a Category 1 partner for cooperation on directed energy
weapons. Look at the little chart again: no check mark for Soreq and DEW.
The only areas where Israel had decent directed energy capabilities
involved conventional lasers that didnt use nuclear bombs, like Hebrew
Universitys Wiggler Less Free Electron Laser. On the other hand, IAI and
Rafael are ticked for anti-tactical ballistic missile cooperation, something
that later happened. Yep, the report says precisely the opposite of what

Smith, Greider, and the others say it records Keelers side-eye at Soreqs
sorry computer codes.

It is too bad, really, because the document is very important it is one of a

few hard-to-find data points that we have about a really interesting
question: Does Israel have thermonuclear weapons? If so, what
kind? Townsley and Robinson cant answer that question, but they got to
make an assessment of the computer codes that would be necessary for
such a development and write down an unclassified answer.

There are some people who believe that Israel conducted a covert nuclear
test in 1979, with the assistance of South Africa. I find the technical
evidence unpersuasive, but Avner Cohen makes a strong circumstantial
case for a test in The Worst-Kept Secret: Israels Bargain with the Bomb.
Given the likely yield of the flash in the South Atlantic, the most plausible
purpose of such a test would have to have been for a primary of an Israeli
thermonuclear weapon.
Moreover, there is also a debate about the models of Israeli nuclear
weapons that whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu released in the mid-1980s.
Ted Taylor, a former U.S. nuclear weapons designer, concluded that the
models showed a layer cake design a primary boosted with layers of
a thermonuclear fuel such as lithium-6 deuteride. Seymour Hersh, on the
other hand, reported in his book The Samson Option that Los Alamos and

Livermore concluded that the pictures showed an enhanced radiation

warhead a so-called neutron bomb that is a very fancy thermonuclear
weapon with a small primary and a tricked-out secondary that throws lots
and lots of neutrons.
So there are two possibilities here. One is that Israel had a simple and
untested layer cake design that falls short of a true thermonuclear
weapon; the other is that Israel developed and tested a very sophisticated
thermonuclear weapon with a tailored radiation output.

So who is right? I dont have the slightest idea! Ive been collecting
documents and images for many years, interviewing people as I can, and
trying to get at this very question. The record is pretty spotty. The
documents and photographs are hard to come by, less due to secrecy than
because paper records get lost over the decades. Ive only been able to find
the first page of Taylors analysis of the Vanunu disclosures, for example,
although it was summarized in Stephen Greens Living by the Sword.
Thats what makes Townsley and Robinsons report so interesting. It is one
of these incredibly hard-to-find documents that Ive been collecting. It is
amazing, and very important in its own way. But what it tends to suggest is
the opposite of what Smith, Greider, and others assert. Townsley and
Robinson concluded that Israel did not, at least in 1987, have the computer
codes necessary to support a successful thermonuclear weapons program. I
am not sure I believe them, nor am I ready to conclude the debate is settled

based on one visit to Soreq. But thats what the document says at any rate.
Presuming, of course, that you read it.