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.
Jerome B. Wiesner was President John F. Kennedy's science adviser. He was Jewish, but was totally cut out of the intelligence about Dimona, and assumed that David Ben-Gurion had requested that he not deal with that issue in the White House. Wiesner played a major role on disarmament issues for the Kennedy administration and had served as a board member of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He frequently ran into Ben-Gurion on visits to Israel, who would always ask him two questions: "Can computers think? And should we build a nuclear weapon?" Wiesner consistently answered "no" to the latter, which he believed marked him as a liberal in Ben-Gurion's eyes and limited his access.1
Sources
- Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 8. ↩
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