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Britain's secret nuclear deal with Israel revealed by BBC

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Aug 4, IRNA
UK-Israel Nuclear Arms
Britain secretly sold Israel 20 tonnes of heavy water for its nuclear programme in 1958, according to official documents disclosed by the BBC.

The decision to export the heavy water, used in the production of plutonium, was found to have been made by civil servants and apparently without the prior consent of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's Conservative government and the US at the time.

The revelation is seen undermining the UK's current leading role in EU attempts to prevent Iran using its right to enrich uranium under the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

Keeping the deal secret may also be a contributory factor in why successive British government have remained so reluctant to put pressure on Israel to admit, let alone destroy, its nuclear arsenal and join the NPT.

The documents, discovered at the Public Records Office by the BBC's Newsnight programme, reveal that Britain supplied the heavy water to Israel without safeguards against military use, enabling the production of nuclear weapons.

The deal was kept secret by being structured as a resale to Norway, but was delivered in two separate shipments from a UK port to Israel's underground reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert.

It was only after the assumed nuclear weapons programme was subsequently revealed by the Daily Express that the Foreign Office was compelled to prevent a further shipment in 1961.

Robert McNamara, who became US Defence Secretary in 1961, insisted that the Kennedy Administration strived to stop Israel from going on to build nuclear weapons and said he had never known about Britain's secret sale at the time.

"The fact Israel was trying to develop a nuclear bomb should not have come as a surprise but that Britain should have supplied it with heavy water was indeed a surprise to me," McNamara told Newsnight programme, broadcast on Wednesday.

"It's very surprising to me that we weren't told because we shared information about the nuclear bomb very closely with the British," he said.

Former British Defence Secretary Lord Gilmour, who was not a minister but was active in Conservative politics during the era, described the revelations as "extraordinary".

"They've gone out of their way to do it without safeguards," he said. "One would have thought that any reasonably educated civil servant wouldn't have dreamed of doing anything like this without consulting a minister but as far as I can see they didn't." It has previously been disclosed that the 20 tons of heavy water originated from Norway, but Oslo has remained silent that it was bought by Britain and sent to Israel.

Nuclear specialist, Frank Barnaby, who said he also had "no idea at all" that the UK was involved in assisting Israel to develop nuclear weapons, described Britain's role as "rather foolhardy." "I would have thought a cautious government would have in no way been seen to be doing anything to help the Israeli nuclear programme," he told the BBC.

HC/1414