THE NUCLEAR NON-ISSUEmuniqué after Nasser’s talks in Moscow. Non-proliferation was listed among a range of
topics on which Eg ypt and the USSR held an “identity of views.” This referred specifi-
cally to Bonn, which unlike East Germany “offered and continues to offer assistance to
Israel.”^11 Otherwise, both parties’ reaction to Israel’s obduracy on the NPT was remark-
ably muted. Meeting US Undersecretary of State Eugene Rostow in Washington the
day Nasser arrived in Moscow, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin “turned to the
question of NPT” only as the last of ten items on his agenda, “asking why Israel had not
signed.” Rostow was constrained to mouth the same Israeli excuses that the Americans
themselves had rejected. But Dobrynin responded calmly that “he believed Israelis
realized they could not achieve security through nuclear weapons.”^12
Rusk warned the newly elected President Nixon in the transition process that “if
the Israelis developed nuclear weapons ... the Soviet Union would respond by putting
nuclear weapons into Eg ypt.”^13 But this prediction did not materialize, and the
Eg yptians disclaimed any intent to obtain such arms from Soviet or other sources.
According to Heikal, when Muammar Qaddafi made his first visit to Eg ypt as Libyan
president and asked, “‘do the Israelis have nuclear bombs?’ Nasser said this was ‘a
strong possibility.’” However, when “two or three months later,” Qaddafi’s “second
man,” Abdel Salam Jalloud, came to ask for support for buying a “tactical” bomb from
China, Nasser was cool to the idea and “Jalloud came back empty-handed.”^14
In February 1968, Henry Kissinger (on a foray into the Middle East as an adviser to
Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign) saw little to deter a first strike by Soviet
missiles. He warned Israeli academics that the Soviets were liable to “go to the brink” to
aid an Eg yptian offensive for recapturing lost territory, including use of intermediate
range ballistic missiles (IRBMs) against Israeli targets in Sinai (such as air bases), and
no US administration would risk a response. The sole testimony to this exchange, from
Shlomo Aronson, does not specify whether Kissinger factored Israeli nuclear response
into his calculations. He had made his reputation by contemplating the possibility of
limited nuclear war, but when pressed by the Israelis, he clarified that the Soviet missiles
he envisaged would be conventionally tipped and based in Eg ypt. Kissinger did not say
whether his estimate was based on Soviet statements, US intelligence or theoretical
speculation, but in 1973 it turned out to be fairly accurate.^15
A year after the NPT signing, Kissinger (now as Nixon’s national security adviser)
submitted an excruciatingly convoluted report to the president about options for US
action toward Israel on the nuclear matter. It quite correctly noted that “both Soviets
and Arabs have been surprisingly quiet about this issue,” although “the Soviets must
be aware of the general state of Israel’s nuclear weapons.” US agencies at that point
were divided as to whether Israel’s “fissionable material” had already been used to
produce “completed nuclear weapons” for ten of its French-supplied surface-to-sur-
face missiles. The Americans saw little prospect of turning back the clock, and their
half-hearted efforts to get Israel to accede to the NPT assumed US acquiescence with
Israel’s continued possession of weapons so long as it remained undeclared. Even the