Israel had a “doomsday operation” secret plan to explode a nuclear weapon in Egypt if it appeared in danger of defeat by its Arab foes during the Six-Day War of 1967, it has been disclosed.
On the eve of the conflict 50 years ago this week, Israeli officials scrambled to perfect an atomic device and prepared to detonate it on top of a mountain in the Sinai Peninsula.
Details of the secret plan, reported by The New York Times, have been revealed by some of the protagonists in scholarly interviews in Israel.
Itzhak Yaakov, a retired brigadier-general, said it was believed the demonstration blast would have intimidated Egypt and the surrounding Arab states of Syria, Iraq and Jordan into pulling back.
In the event, Israel triumphed so quickly — within a week — that the atomic device was never transported to Sinai.
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“It’s the last secret of the 1967 war,” said Avner Cohen, an Israeli academic nuclear who conducted the interviews.
Yaakov, who co-ordinated weapons development for the Israel Defence Forces, outlined the plan to Cohen in 1999 and 2000, years before he died in 2013 at the age of 87.
“Look, it was so natural,” Yaakov told Cohen. “You’ve got an enemy and he says he’s going to throw you to the sea. You believe him.
“How can you stop him? You scare him. If you’ve got something you can scare him with, you scare him.”
Israel has never acknowledged the existence of its nuclear arsenal, in an effort to preserve its policy of “nuclear ambiguity” and head off calls for a nuclear-free region.
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In 2001 Yaakov was arrested, at the age of 75, on charges that he had compromised Israeli national security by talking about the nuclear programme to a journalist whose work was censored.