THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973menace indicates that the Israelis were not aware of—or preferred not to acknowl-
edge—the continuing assignment, from at least several months before the Six-Day
War, of Israeli targets for Soviet nuclear-missile submarines in the Mediterranean,
with orders to fire if Israel tried to use any WMD. Kosygin, visiting Eg ypt in May
1966, confirmed a pledge to this effect that was evidently given there by Defense
Minister Grechko the previous December. The Soviets promised this guarantee in
order to deflect Eg yptian demands for nuclear weapons, after reports—including one
from an authoritative Israeli source—indicated that Israel was resolved to acquire
them, and was approaching this target.^4 The Soviets’ apprehension that a nuclear-
armed Israel might both weaken Moscow’s ability to repeat the successful 1956
exercise in favor of Arab clients and endanger the southern USSR led to the Soviet
initiative that sparked the Six-Day War, in a botched attempt to halt the Israeli proj-
ect—the preemptive war that Nasser had repeatedly threatened since 1960.
According to most retrospective sources, including the leaders of the Israeli nuclear
project, it did cross the weapons threshold on the very eve of the 1967 war. But the
first CIA estimate that acknowledged Israel had produced at least four bombs was
filed only in February 1968 and was based on a volunteered personal account from a
visitor to Israel, rather than on the agency’s own intelligence.^5 It was suppressed by
order of the president, and a State Department study composed three months later
still treated an Israeli “nuclear decision” only as a potentiality.^6
If the Soviets had better data, they did not make much of it. As early as November
1968, the Russian-born Canadian UN delegate George Ignatieff stressed to an Israeli
colleague that the Soviet Union was eager to reach a nuclear arms control agreement
with the United States, without so much as mentioning an Israeli angle. He pointed
to the Soviets’ main motive being the “USSR’s mortal fear of a renewed German
menace” as the spearhead of a West European nuclear power.^7 When, in US–USSR
talks to finalize the NPT, problematic countries were discussed one by one, Israel was
not listed except as an accessory of West Germany, whose putative nuclear armament
was the Soviets’ overriding concern.^8
Simultaneously with his nuclear guarantee to Eg ypt in 1966, the Soviet prime
minister had promoted (unsuccessfully) a “Kosygin Initiative” for a clause in the
nascent NPT. It would bar “nuclear” nations that acceded to the treaty from threat-
ening “non-nuclear” ones, but only if the latter had no nuclear weapons stationed on
their soil. This was generally interpreted as designed to exclude West Germany.^9 In
Soviet perceptions, Israeli and German nuclear aspirations were closely connected,
and were similarly suspected as part of a US plot to surround the USSR with nuclear-
armed pacts. Then-Middle East correspondent Evgeny Primakov’s 2006 book still
charges technical cooperation between the German and Israeli nuclear programs in
1968, but the data is both questionable and derived from later Western literature.^10
The alleged West German–Israeli connection—a Soviet concern more than an
Eg yptian one—accounted for the only allusion to nuclear weapons in the joint com-