Here's something I wrote in response to the FP article:
NIXON AND THE ISRAELI BOMB: DID HE COMMIT THE US TO OMERTÁ?
Victor Gilinsky
The US government’s recent
declassification of documents relating to the Nixon administration’s
review on what to do about Israel’s nuclear weapons has revived the myth
of a secret 1969 pact between Richard Nixon and Israel’s Prime Minister
Golda Meir, one that still binds US policy: if Israel kept mum about
its bomb the United States would, too.[1]
What really happened in 1969—in midst of the Cold War—was that the
United States and Israel both remained silent so as not to provoke Arab
pressures on the Soviet Union to provide them with nuclear help, a
rationale that has no relevance today. The insidious aspect of the
current “pact-of-silence” interpretation of the Nixon-Meir September
1969 meeting is that it justifies a continued gag on America that only
Israel can remove.The United States needs to be free to speak clearly if it is to gain support for controlling the spread of nuclear weapons. The subject bears most immediately on America’s ability to participate in the international conference on weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East, mandated by a unanimous vote of the 2010 Nonproliferation Treaty Review Conference. You can’t very well participate in such a conference if you pretend ignorance about Israel’s nuclear status, which is what the US government has been doing. It has also been dragging its feet about having a Mideast weapons conference at all, but with the 2015 NPT Review Conference around the corner, there is increasing international pressure on the United States to participate.
A good place to start is by unraveling the claimed obligations to maintain silence regarding Israel’s bomb stemming from the 1969 Nixon-Meir meeting. What frequently goes unmentioned is that the meeting was strictly one-on-one. No one else was present, not even Henry Kissinger, the president’s national security advisor. There is no known written record describing what took place, not even a second-hand one, so we can only speculate.
Kissinger’s absence from the meeting vitiates the interpretations of Nixon’s actions in light of the (now declassified) interagency study on Israeli nuclear weapons and proliferation that Henry Kissinger had conducted for the president in advance of the meeting. Nixon had his own ideas on the subject, and they didn’t have much to do with Kissinger’s study. When it came to dealing with Israel, Nixon mainly had other things on his mind than proliferation. A strong clue as to what they were is in a March 1970 Nixon memorandum to Kissinger, which Nixon quotes almost entirely in his Memoirs.
Nixon told Kissinger that, in further talks with Meir and Rabin, Kissinger needed to “lay it on the line” that the key to Nixon’s own pro-Israel stance was opposition to Soviet expansion. He was committed to helping Israel maintain a military “edge,” but also counting on Israel to stand with the United States in the Cold War. Nixon complained that he did not get many Jewish votes. He was especially annoyed that US Jews were hawks on Israeli defense but doves on Vietnam; he expected Israeli help in straightening out their co-religionists. (He added grimly, “Unless they [the Israelis] understand it and act as if they understood it beginning now they are down the tubes.”) If there was an explicit Nixon-Meir deal, this is what it would likely have been about—the US supply of advanced weapons in return for Israeli support on opposing Soviet expansion and help in shifting US Jewish voters to the Republican column.
As to secrecy about Israel’s bomb, there was no need at the time for anything more than a wink and a nod, as both Nixon and Meir had parallel interests in avoiding Arab efforts to match Israel’s capability. The Soviets, who undoubtedly had their own sources within Israel, had an interest in secrecy, too.
The relevant question today is: Does any residual US obligation for silence about Israel’s bomb remain from the 1969 meeting? The Soviets are history, and everyone knows the Israelis have nuclear weapons, so the logic that initially supported the US pretense of ignorance about Israel’s status has evaporated. In any case, the notion of an obligation growing out of an unrecorded meeting over forty years ago, whose content no one can know, is just plain silly.
While it remains convenient from the Israeli point of view to maintain that the United States remains obligated by a 1969 Nixon-Meir deal until released by Israel, it makes no sense from a US point of view. Whether US presidents have obligated themselves subsequently to protect Israel’s nuclear status with American silence is something we don’t know. One thing we do know: that at this point, the United States is not keeping a secret; it is just making itself look ridiculous and hypocritical in the eyes of the world.
[1] September 12, 2014, online Foreign Policy, “If you don’t like Israeli Nuclear Weapons: Blame Nixon,” by Avner Cohen and William Burr; see also September 16, 2014 online Atlantic article “Israel's Worst-Kept Secret,” Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith, (http://www.theatlantic.com/
On September 12, 2014 at 2:45 PM Michele Kearney <micheletkearney@gmail.com> wrote:
Dept Of Secrets
Don't Like That Israel Has the Bomb? Blame Nixon.
Newly declassified documents reveal how the Nixon White House looked the other way while Israel built the Middle East’s first nukes.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/
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