# Nuclear Scientists & Programs Scientists and officials central to nuclear weapons development, proliferation, and policy. | Name | Description | | --- | --- | | [[Abraham Feinberg]] | Abraham Feinberg was a wealthy New York businessman and ardent advocate of statehood for Israel. | | [[Abraham Sourassi]] | Abraham Sourassi was a senior Israeli engineer at Dimona, responsible for building the reprocessing plant. | | [[Aharon Katchalsky]] | Aharon Katchalsky, later known as Aharon Katzir, was a specialist in the electrolytic properties of chain molecules and a pioneer researcher in the related field of muscle-powered robotics. | | [[Alexander M. Haig, Jr.]] | Secretary of State under President Reagan who was present at high-command meetings following Israel's 1981 bombing of the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor. | | [[Algie A. Wells]] | Director of international affairs for the AEC in 1958 who believed U.S. officials could have learned about Israel's Dimona reactor earlier. | | [[Allen Dulles]] | Allen Dulles served as the Director of the CIA from 1953 to 1961. | | [[Amos Deshalit]] | Amos Deshalit was a prominent Israeli physicist who headed the physics division at the Weizmann Institute of Science. | | [[Andrew J. Goodpaster]] | U.S. Army General who served as military aide to Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon and was involved in diplomatic exchanges regarding Israel's Dimona nuclear facility. | | [[Arthur C. Lundahl]] | Lundahl played a crucial role in the U-2 Spy Plane program, becoming the American government's most listened-to briefing officer. | | [[Arthur Krock]] | Arthur Krock was a prominent Washington columnist for the *New York Times*. | | [[Aviem Sella]] | Colonel Aviem Sella was an Israeli Air Force officer and a nuclear targeting expert who was implicated in the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, where he worked with Pollard to obtain intelligence from the U.S. | | [[Avraham Harman]] | Avraham Harman was the Israeli ambassador to the United States. | | [[Bertrand Goldschmidt]] | Bertrand Goldschmidt was a French nuclear chemist who served during World War II with American nuclear researchers, becoming an expert in the chemistry of plutonium and plutonium extraction. | | [[Binyamin Blumberg]] | Binyamin Blumberg was a former military intelligence officer handpicked by Shimon Peres to direct the Office of Special Tasks, a new intelligence agency created to provide security for Israel's burgeoning nuclear operation at Dimona. | | [[Bourke B. Hickenlooper]] | Conservative Republican Senator who accused Israel of lying about its secret nuclear reactor at Dimona during a closed 1961 Senate session. | | [[Bruce Williams]] | Bruce Williams was a U.S. | | [[Carl Kaysen]] | Carl Kaysen is a distinguished political economist who served as deputy assistant to the President for national security affairs. | | [[Caspar Weinberger]] | Caspar Weinberger served as the Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. | | [[Chapman Pincher]] | Chapman Pincher was a British journalist known for his close ties to the British intelligence and nuclear communities. | | [[Charles N. Van Doren]] | Deputy general counsel of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency who believed Israel was the Achilles heel of U.S. nonproliferation policy. | | [[Christian A. Herter]] | Secretary of State under Eisenhower who confronted Israel and France over the Dimona nuclear reactor after being shown photographic evidence. | | [[Christian Pineau]] | Christian Pineau was a French politician who served as Foreign Minister. | | [[Daniel Ellsberg]] | Daniel Ellsberg was an American activist and former military analyst who famously leaked the Pentagon Papers to the *New York Times* in 1971. | | [[David Ben-Gurion]] | David Ben-Gurion, often referred to as the 'Old Man,' was a central figure in the establishment of Israel and served as its first Prime Minister and Defense Minister from 1948 to 1963, with one brief interlude. | | [[David E. Long]] | State Department Middle East expert who revealed that Israeli nuclear intelligence was treated as a strictly taboo subject within the U.S. bureaucracy. | | [[David Lowenthal]] | David Lowenthal was one of the initial stockholders in the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC). | | [[Donald M. Kerr, Jr.]] | Acting director of defense programs at the Department of Energy who directed the Nuclear Intelligence Panel study of the 1979 Vela satellite flash, concluding it was a nuclear bomb. | | [[Edward Teller]] | Edward Teller was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist who is widely known as the 'father of the hydrogen bomb.' He and other American nuclear weapons designers understood well before the end of World War II that a far more powerful nuclear device, with fission as merely a first step, was theo | | [[Eugene M. Braderman]] | Deputy assistant secretary of state for commercial affairs who was pressured by Israelis to help the U.S. accept Israel's nuclear weapons. | | [[Eugene Wigner]] | Eugene Wigner was a Hungarian-American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate. | | [[Floyd L. Culler, Jr.]] | Culler's team spent days at Dimona, climbing through various excavations, but found nothing suspicious, despite the elaborate Israeli deception, which included a false control room and practice sessions for Israeli technicians. | | [[Frank Barnaby]] | Frank Barnaby was a nuclear physicist and former employee of Britain's nuclear weapons installation at Aldermaston. | | [[Frank Press]] | Frank Press was the presidential science adviser during the Carter administration. | | [[Gary Francis Powers]] | Gary Francis Powers was an American pilot whose U-2 Spy Plane was shot down over the Soviet Union on May 1, 1960, leading to a major international incident. | | [[George A. Cowan]] | American nuclear weapons designer at Los Alamos for over twenty years who acknowledged close associations with Israeli physicists from the Weizmann Institute. | | [[George Ball]] | George Ball served as the Under Secretary of State during the Kennedy administration. | | [[George H.W. Bush]] | Vice President under Reagan and 41st U.S. President who dealt with Israel's nuclear program, the VELA incident, and sanctions discussions after Osirak bombing. | | [[Gerald Bull]] | In 1981, Bull approached Israel Military Industries in Israel hoping to sell his project, but they were more interested in missile technology. | | [[Glenn R. Cella]] | Cella was dismayed that a study of the military balance in the region, ordered by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), made no mention of Israeli nuclear capability. | | [[Golda Meir]] | In 1956, Golda Meir replaced Moshe Sharett as Foreign Minister, bringing her distinctive approach to Israel's international relations. | | [[Hans Bethe]] | Hans Bethe was a German-American theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1967. | | [[Harold M. Agnew]] | American physicist and Los Alamos director (1970-1979) who served on the Nuclear Intelligence Panel and criticized suppression of the VELA Satellite findings. | | [[Harry H. Schwartz]] | Aide to Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke who witnessed Warnke directly confronting Israeli Ambassador Rabin about Israel's nuclear weapons program. | | [[Hedrick Smith]] | Hedrick Smith was a Washington correspondent for the *New York Times*. | | [[Henry A. Kissinger]] | Kissinger approached inauguration day on January 20, 1969, convinced that Israel's nuclear ambitions were justified and understandable. | | [[I. I. Rabi]] | American physicist and Nobel laureate who visited Israel's Dimona reactor in 1961 and reported no evidence of a weapons facility. | | [[Ian Smart]] | Ian Smart was a young British diplomat who served as third secretary of the British embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1950s. | | [[J. Edgar Hoover]] | Hoover was a frequent visitor to the Hotel Del Charro in La Jolla, California, an exclusive hotel opened by Clint Murchison, Sr. | | [[J. Robert Oppenheimer]] | Oppenheimer's personal papers indicate he visited Israel in May 1958 to participate in ceremonies marking the opening of the Institute of Nuclear Science in Rehovot. | | [[Jack P. Ruina]] | His panel's assignment was carefully weighted towards investigating the possibility that the VELA sighting had been a false alarm. | | [[James A. Baker III]] | Chief of Staff under President Reagan who agreed sanctions against Israel were essential after the 1981 bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor. | | [[James E. Lovett]] | Senior AEC scientist hired by NUMEC who discovered that missing uranium was embedded in concrete floors and ventilation systems. | | [[James R. Schlesinger]] | Secretary of Defense under Nixon and Ford who observed Kissinger's strategy during the 1973 Yom Kippur War of wanting Israel to succeed but bleed. | | [[Jens C. Hauge]] | Norwegian official who conducted Norway's only inspection of heavy water sold to Israel, accepting Bergmann's claims uncritically. | | [[Jerome B. Wiesner]] | President Kennedy's science adviser who was deliberately excluded from intelligence about Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor at David Ben-Gurion's request. | | [[Jody Powell]] | Jody Powell was President Jimmy Carter's press secretary. | | [[John A. McCone]] | McCone's leak was his parting shot as AEC commissioner, as he announced his resignation shortly after. | | [[John F. Kennedy]] | Kennedy's presidency was marked by a struggle with Israel over its nuclear ambitions, particularly concerning the Dimona reactor. | | [[John Foster Dulles]] | John Foster Dulles served as the Secretary of State under President Dwight D. | | [[John L. Hadden]] | Hadden sent Colonel Carmelo V. | | [[John von Neumann]] | John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and physicist who made significant contributions to quantum physics, functional analysis, set theory, economics, computer science, and nuclear physics. | | [[John Vorster]] | John Vorster was the Prime Minister of South Africa. | | [[John W. Finney]] | Finney's article, published on December 19, 1960, on the front page of the *Times*, informed the American public about what Arthur C. | | [[Joseph O. Zurhellen, Jr.]] | Deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv who dismissed concerns about Dimona as Israeli disinformation. | | [[Levi Eshkol]] | Levi Eshkol was an Israeli politician who served as Prime Minister of Israel from 1963 to 1969. | | [[Lewis L. Strauss]] | Strauss chose not to talk about the Israeli nuclear program because, as a Jew with deep feelings about the Holocaust, he privately approved of it. | | [[Louis H. Roddis, Jr.]] | Nuclear Intelligence Panel member who concluded the 1979 Vela satellite event was a South African-Israeli nuclear test and accused the White House of suppressing the finding. | | [[Malcolm Toon]] | Malcolm Toon was the U.S. | | [[Maurice Bourges-Maunoury]] | Maurice Bourges-Maunoury was a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France in 1957. | | [[Max Ben]] | Max Ben was a Princeton-trained pharmacologist who was helping the Israelis set up a pharmacology institute under United Nations auspices. | | [[Menachem Begin]] | Menachem Begin was the 6th Prime Minister of Israel, serving from 1977 to 1983. | | [[Mordecai Hod]] | Mordecai Hod was the chief of staff of the Israeli Air Force. | | [[Mordecai Vanunu]] | Vanunu began working as a technician at Dimona in August 1977 and spent much of the next eight years assigned to various tasks inside the reprocessing plant, formally known as Machon 2 and informally as the Tunnel. | | [[Morton H. Halperin]] | Close aide to Kissinger on the NSC staff who recalled Kissinger's belief that Israel and Japan would be better off with nuclear weapons. | | [[Myer Feldman]] | Myer Feldman, also known as Mike Feldman, served as President John F. | | [[Myron B. Kratzer]] | Director of international affairs for the Atomic Energy Commission during the period Israel's nuclear program was exposed in 1960. | | [[Niels Bohr]] | Niels Bohr was a Danish physicist who made foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum theory, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922. | | [[Orwin C. Talbott]] | Lieutenant General told point-blank by Israeli Chief of Staff David Elazar about Israel's nuclear threat during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. | | [[Oscar Guerrero]] | Freelance Colombian journalist who met Mordecai Vanunu in Sydney and received top-secret photographs of Israel's nuclear facility. | | [[Paul C. Warnke]] | Assistant Secretary of Defense who pressured Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and directly confronted Israel about its nuclear weapons program. | | [[Philip J. Farley]] | Special assistant to John Foster Dulles for arms control who quietly investigated the French connection to Israel's nuclear program. | | [[Pierre Gallois]] | Pierre Gallois was a retired French general and the intellectual spokesman for the French nuclear program. | | [[Pierre Mendes-France]] | Pierre Mendès-France was a French politician who served as Prime Minister of France from 1954 to 1955. | | [[Pinhas Sapir]] | Pinhas Sapir was an Israeli politician who, along with Levi Eshkol, dominated the Israeli budget process for more than fifteen years. | | [[Raymond Fox]] | Raymond Fox was an American nuclear physicist who emigrated to Israel in 1957 from California, where he had access to weapons design information at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. | | [[Richard V. Allen]] | Allen personally relayed the message to Ariel Sharon in the fall of 1981 that the United States would no longer permit Israel to get KH-11 imagery of the Soviet Union or any other country outside the hundred-mile limit, re-enforcing the initial 1979 restrictions. | | [[Robert S. McNamara]] | Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson who was pressured by pro-Israel fundraiser Abraham Feinberg not to interfere with Israel's nuclear activities. | | [[Robert T. Webber]] | Physicist and scientific attache at the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv who gathered intelligence on Israel's Dimona nuclear facility alongside CIA station chief John Hadden. | | [[Ronald Reagan]] | Ronald Reagan was the 40th President of the United States, serving from 1981 to 1989. | | [[Seymour Hersh]] | Hersh conducted extensive research for *The Samson Option*, interviewing many senior American officials, most of whom spoke for the first time about their knowledge of Israel's nuclear arsenal. | | [[Shalheveth Freier]] | Shalheveth Freier was an Israeli nuclear physicist with impeccable credentials. | | [[Shimon Peres]] | Peres's rise to influence began in late 1953, when David Ben-Gurion appointed the then thirty-year-old Shimon Peres as director general of the ministry of defense. | | [[Shimon Yiftach]] | Shimon Yiftach was the director of scientific programs for the Israeli defense ministry. | | [[Stuart Symington]] | Stuart Symington was a Democratic Senator from Missouri. | | [[Walworth Barbour]] | Walworth Barbour was the American ambassador to Israel from 1961 to 1973, serving longer in one post than all but three other American ambassadors. | | [[William N. Dale]] | Dale objected to the policy change after the 1967 Six-Day War, when Walworth Barbour ordered the embassy's military attachés to stop reporting on Dimona and to no longer undercut the Israelis by conducting operations with their British or Canadian counterparts. | | [[William R. Crawford]] | Crawford recalled that Ben-Gurion's reply was long, evasive, and did not agree to the IAEA inspection of Dimona. | | [[Yehoshua Saguy]] | Yehoshua Saguy was the chief of military intelligence in Israel. | | [[Yigael Yadin]] | Yigael Yadin served as the Deputy Prime Minister of Israel. | | [[Yigal Allon]] | Yigal Allon was a 1948 war hero and a close adviser to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol. | | [[Yitzhak Hofi]] | Yitzhak Hofi was the director of Mossad, Israel's primary foreign intelligence service. | | [[Yitzhak Rabin]] | As army chief of operations, Yitzhak Rabin was among the old-fashioned military men, including Yigal Allon and Ariel Sharon, who believed that Israel's essential advantage over the Arabs was the quality and training of its military personnel. | | [[Yuval Neeman]] | Yuval Neeman was an Israeli physicist and defense ministry intelligence officer. | | [[Zalman Mordecai Shapiro]] | Zalman Mordecai Shapiro was an American Jew and owner of the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), a privately owned nuclear enriching plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. |