IDF general talks about Israel’s scrapped plan to use nuclear weapon in 1967

Yitzhak Yaakov

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New details emerge about a last-resort contingency plan prepared by Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov to detonate a nuclear device in the middle of the Sinai desert as a warning to Egyptian President Nasser; ‘The goal was to plant a nuclear device on a hilltop in the Abu-Ageila area, and to blow it up when the prime minister gives the order to do so,’ Yaakov says in series of interviews that were banned for publication by Israeli Military Censorship, but excerpts of which have been made public by a US think tank.

Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov, one of the founders of the IDF’s weapons development program, was in Washington in May 1967 to take part in a war games exercise at the RAND Corporation, a military research think tank.
“At the end of the war games, Israel used a nuclear weapon against Egypt, as a response to Egyptian surface-to-surface missiles that hit Tel Aviv,” Yaakov said.

(Photo: Yedioth Ahronoth)

“All of the other participants, who knew what I do for a living, had puzzled expressions on their faces. I told them Israel doesn’t have nuclear weapons and that this whole scenario was completely imaginary, a wild fantasy,” Yaakov continued.

But such a scenario was not entirely farfetched. As tensions mounted in the run-up to the 1967 Six-Day War, Yaakov was asked to return to Israel from the US posthaste and prepare a last-resort contingency plan for Israel to detonate a nuclear device in the Sinai Peninsula as a warning to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to end hostilities against Israel in the event it found itself losing the war.

Brig. Gen. Yaakov revealed the details of that contingency plan, codenamed Operation Samson, in a series of interviews between 1999 and 2001 with Dr. Ronen Bergman and nuclear policy researcher Dr. Avner Cohen.

Yaakov and Elazar

The IDF censor barred the publication of the interview in Yedioth Ahronoth in 2001, but on Saturday the New York Times published excerpts from the interviews, while additional transcripts have been made public by the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars on Sunday as part of the think tank’s Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.

Over the course of these interviews, Brig. Gen. Yaakov admitted that before 1967 “nobody thought that we were close to using” the nuclear device that was being developed in Dimona and the idea to detonate the device in the Sinai Peninsula was “spontaneous rather than planned.”

“I don’t think that we thought that we are ready to start working on a bomb. There was even no fuse… I don’t think that anyone thought in terms of ‘we might need it anytime soon,'” he said.

Nevertheless, the use of unconventional weapons was not entirely alien to the IDF. “We prepared multi-year plans which also encompassed unconventional weapons. We presented those plans in General Staff discussions at least once a year, and there were discussions on these issues,” Yaakov said. “There were those who thought we were wasting money… The discussions were very substantive.”

According to Brig. Gen. Yaakov, the scenario was even drilled. “I may be wrong (about the exact date) because it may not have been before 1967… (but) at a certain point we did a command and control exercise… in which we went over the entire process, from the moment of issuing the order to its implementation. It took about two hours… It was a telephone exercise,” he recounted.

Still, he said, “We didn’t think about it in operational terms at all, since we all understood it was a kind of a ‘doomsday weapon’… You won’t have a conventional war after using such a weapon.”

L-R Yaakov, Bergman

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