When you’re tired of the smokescreens and empty language in current politics, a dose of history can be pretty refreshing.
Since 2003, the term “Weapons of Mass Destruction” has made the rounds from rhetoric to buzzword to something else entirely. It’s the stuff of political cartoons, both a laughing matter and a bitter reminder that there’s something absurd about our current war.
But it also reveals a striking tendency of government officials and the media to gloss over detail in order to appeal to the heart rather than the mind.
Would we ever say the United States has “Weapons of Mass Destruction?” Regardless of reality, would we say Israel has them? It is pretty clear that the phrase is less a statement about weapons than about the character of an enemy nation.
Perhaps that’s why Michael Karpin’s book, “The Bomb in the Basement: How Israel Went Nuclear and What That Means for the World,” is so intriguing.
It avoids broad overviews and manipulative language and details the fascinating origins of Israel’s nuclear program, down to the phone calls, letters and meetings of key figures. The in-depth historical information comes from the perspective of those who were involved. And the best part is, it’s riveting.
Karpin is interested not only in the political action but in the people themselves.
Lesser-known figures like Munya Mardor, the founder of Israel’s Weapons Development Authority (RAFAEL), and Abel Thomas, a “philo-Semitic gentile” instrumental in forming Israel’s link to France, are more than just names on paper; they’re developed into real people, each with his own talents and idiosyncrasies.
But Karpin’s portrait of David Ben-Gurion is the most enlightening.
In his book, recently released in paperback, Karpin describes the prime minister’s visits to the Dachau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and how — amid threats by Arab leaders to “throw the Jews into the sea” — it became “etched in his consciousness” that only an atomic bomb could prevent another Holocaust.
“Today, few Israelis are aware of the depth of the anxiety that afflicted the founding father of the Jewish state,” Karpin writes. “Ben-Gurion lived constantly with the feeling that at any minute Israel could be conquered and disappear off the face of the globe. He took the threats of the Arab leaders … with utter seriousness. While he generally concealed from the wider public his fears that another Holocaust was about to befall his nation, among his close associates he gave free rein to his emotions.”
But this book is not merely a character study; its greatest strength is the author’s ability to narrate a complex sequence of events with the linear structure of a good story.
To those less familiar with the subject, the biggest surprise will be that it was France — not the United States — that enabled Israel to obtain the bomb.
While the U.S. was largely unsupportive, several of the highest members in the French government were sympathetic to the Zionist cause and initiated secret transfers of tanks, fighter jets, antitank rockets and artillery shells to Israel.
Later, they would defy U.S. wishes and supply Israel with a powerful nuclear reactor and a plant for the separation of plutonium — that is, “according to foreign sources.”
As the author notes, the Israeli government — which reserves the right to block anything that might damage the state of Israel — has forced the phrase “according to sources” into publications concerning the state’s nuclear capabilities, along with replacing phrases like “nuclear weapons” with “nuclear capabilities” in an attempt to truly keep the bomb “in the basement.”
Despite the fact that Karpin had to run his book through Israeli censors, it remains a raw, truthful historical work. The writing is forceful and witty in its presentation of history, treating key figures like actors in a play while maintaining an emphasis on pure information — even down to the practical realities of constructing an atomic bomb.
“The Bomb in the Basement” avoids the murky waters of commentary and bias and sticks to the actual details.
If only we could get a little more of that about the crucial issues of today.