Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim

From END Info 24 | May/June 2021 DOWNLOAD HERE

Ken Coates

This text was first published as a chapter in Israel’s Bomb: The First Victim - The Case of Mordechai Vanunu (Spokesman Books, 1988). The book includes an introduction and concluding chapter by Vanunu, along with material from The Sunday Times investigation into the case and further analysis. The book was published to aid the work of the International Campaign for Mordechai Vanunu, of which the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation was a supporting organisation.

On the 6th July 1987, thirty-six British Members of Parliament wrote to the Norwegian Nobel Committee to nominate Mr. Mordechai Vanunu of Israel for the Nobel Peace Prize. Since Mr. Vanunu was currently held in prison in Jerusalem, this was an unusual nomination. What were the reasons for it?

“On the 5th October 1986” reports the proposal, “Mr. Vanunu published in the Sunday Times a detailed story about the Israeli Government’s nuclear bomb factory near Dimona in Southern Israel. In addition to a detailed description, Mr. Vanunu furnished the newspaper with photographs and diagrams, and his account of the plan was found to be ‘entirely authentic’ by a number of international experts who subsequently examined it.

The threat of nuclear proliferation into various hot spots around the world is one of the major perils confronting the international community. It takes prodigious courage for a private citizen to confront his own government on such a sensitive issue. Mr. Vanunu has paid a very heavy penalty. For revealing his knowledge, he was kidnapped in Rome, and secretly taken to Israel, where he has been locked in solitary confinement. Even his family have now been denied the right to visit him. Although be faces a death sentence, his trial is being conducted in secrecy.”

As the parliamentarians point out, there is reason for deep concern about the Israeli Government’s preparation of nuclear weapons. The decision is a provocation: if it were not challenged, on what basis could any impartial person reproach the Arab States if they were to follow suit? The nuclearization of conflict or potential conflict in one of the world’s hottest of “hot spots” can only be a terribly dangerous precedent.

But we should observe from the very outset of this discussion that Mr. Vanunu’s kidnap is itself an illegal act, which has no conceivable justification in international conventions. We cannot doubt that the Italian Government would have refused to extradite Mr. Vanunu for trial, on any of the evidence which is available. Vanunu’s revelations serve to defend the nonproliferation regime throughout the world, and are clearly a matter of conscience. Such disclosures have aroused disquiet in Italy and England, and any judge in either country would find them quite ineligible for criminal reprisals.

There can be no doubt that Vanunu is a courageous and deeply conscientious person, who has suffered from the most outrageous treatment by the Israeli authorities. We shall return to this question later.

Paranoia

First, however, we must concern ourselves with the substantive issues in this case. What caused the paranoid responses of the Israeli State in this matter? After all, it is not common for States to range across the territories of friendly countries, in order to bring about the abduction of political dissidents. Vanunu was spirited from London to Rome, where he was forcibly drugged, and chained-up for transportation to Tel Aviv. There does not appear to be any doubt that his departure from Italy was procured by illegal means, in violation of Italian laws and exit formalities. Such extreme measures put the normal conduct of inter-governmental relations under severe challenge. However we examine this affair, there can be no doubt of the culpability of the Israeli authorities. In order to understand this sequence of events, it is necessary to refer back to a succession of lsraeli policy statements on the issue which is really at stake: that of nuclear proliferation.

There is, of course, a long history of public statements by various Israeli spokesmen, on all the issues of nuclear non-proliferation policy. But for the purposes of this argument we have no need to retrace our steps further than the 7th June 1981, when the Osirak nuclear reactor was bombed by Israeli aeroplanes. In a statement purporting to justify this action, the Government of Israel pledged its continuing support for the principle of nonproliferation, for multilateral arms control agreements, and for UN decisions against nuclear proliferation. The statement, The Iraqi Threat - Why Israel had to Act, rehearsed a catalogue of diplomatic initiatives by Israel, in this sense:

“Israel ratified the partial Test Ban Treaty on 15th January 1964, and the Outer Space Treaty on 18th February 1977. On 10th June 1%8, Israel voted in favour of United Nations Resolution 2373 adopting the text of the NPT. It did so in the belief that this would enhance practical and satisfactory solutions for the prevention of nuclear weapons proliferation. In subsequent years, Israel has studied the NPT’s various aspects in reference to the conditions prevailing in the Middle East, and has concluded that the turbulent and constantly shifting conditions still prevailing in the region prevent the Treaty’s implementation in good faith on the part of many of the States in it.

A central assumption of the NPT is the existence of conditions of peace which do not exist today in the area. With the exception of Egypt, the Arab States do not recognize Israel’s right to exist, are continuously preparing themselves to destroy it, and are mostly specialist, were deeply shocked by photographs of a component machined in lithium deuteride. Both authorities believed that the devices shown in this and other photographs provided did not show “a simple atom bomb but a thermo-nuclear bomb”. As the Sunday Times itself concluded: “The verdict of ten senior and expert scientists approached by the Sunday Times is that Vanunu’s testimony cannot be faulted”.

If we accept this evidence, it is evident at once that Mr. Shamir’s statement at the United Nations General Assembly must have been quite untrue, even at the time he made it. If lsrael had already become “the first country in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons into the region”, the promise to refrain from this action in future can only be understood as a deliberate and particularly damaging dishonesty. There are many ways to mislead the General Assembly without telling actual lies: but on the 1st October 1981 it is quite evident that Mr. Shamir went far beyond any license which might conceivably be given to diplomatic evasion. His statement was absolute and categorical: he now owes the United Nations an explanation.

Calculated to undermine

Perhaps the Israeli spokesman is not the only diplomat to have offended in this way, grave though it is to do so. There is, however, a more serious question. On this and a large number of other occasions, as the Israeli Government statement points out, Israel has advocated the conclusion of a Treaty establishing a nuclear weapon free zone throughout the Middle East. To assure the United Nations that Israel “will not be the first” to introduce nuclear weapons, and to demand the creation of a nuclear-free zone, whilst all the time producing and storing a full-scale nuclear arsenal, is to present a package calculated to undermine not only the United Nations but also the very idea of nuclear-free zones. That such misleading declarations have been uttered “annually” hardly mitigates the offence. The Israeli Government itself continuously insists that it wishes to see the establishment of adequate guarantees in this field. As it argues in the text we have already cited: “Restraints of a technical or institutional nature alone can hardly protect the area from nuclear proliferation.” To appeal for the creation of a nuclear free-zone, whilst at the same time secretly building a major stockpile of nuclear weapons, is to furnish an unusually compelling kind of proof for this statement!

It remains true that of all the panoply of partial disarmament measures considered in the United Nations Special Session on Disarmament in 1978, one is preeminent. The agreement to create and enforce nuclear-free zones is among the more achievable objectives for States, and for their peoples, in many parts of the world. Not only in Latin America, but also in other zones such as the South Pacific, or the continent of Africa, the idea of constituting a nuclear-free zone has captured widespread popular support, and mobilized the support of many of the Governments in the areas concerned. In this connection, the experience of the campaign for European Nuclear Disarmament is that millions of Europeans have come to share the view that a nuclear-free zone in all Europe is both possible and desirable. Already there are intense practical negotiations in smaller sub-regions of the European continent, to begin to put in place some parts of what many hope will be a larger jigsaw, sanitising larger and larger areas. The particular merit of such proposals if that they provide a practical linkage between the activities of popular movements and the relevant governments, and they make a space in which a global public opinion can grow. Such an international public mobilisation is crucial to the maintenance of peace through a period of unprecedented crisis, both economic and political. As the popular pressure has begun to develop, the United Nations system has taken on a more material reality for millions of people, so that the vast demonstration which accompanied the opening of the Second Special Session could convince many of the real existence of a new potential in the world.

But the Vanunu case poses a most dire challenge to all this positive thinking. The creation of the Israeli bomb, and its analogue in South Africa, confronts us with a quite new, and very major problem of enforcement of non-nuclear commitments in the military field.

The first lesson of the Vanunu story is clear: that considerable agnosticism is required when evaluating the successive claims of governments which are poised upon the acquisition of nuclear weapons. In retrospect, we now see the French involvement in Israeli nuclear programmes, and in the initial provision of the Dimona reactor in a very clear and sinister light. It is not at all surprising that Israeli leaders can mislead the United Nations, when we remember how they responded to the enquiries of the United States Government about what was going on at Dimona in the early 1960s. “We are building a textile factory”, replied the Israelis. Now it is possible to see the meaning of various other key events in Israel’s military evolution: the French embargo on arms supplies; the pressures of the American administration for ratification of the Non-Proliferation Treaty; the later hiatus over the supply of Pershing missiles. There has evidently been some serious complicity in this act of nuclear provocation, and there are embarrassing questions to be answered in more than one of the world’s chancellories.

The first serious effort to find answers to these questions has been extensively reported in the Christian Science Monitor. The newspaper gives an account of a study by Gary Milhollin, which makes precise allegations of a violation of undertakings given to the Norwegian Government, when a quantity of heavy water was supplied in 1959.

Mordechai Vanunu has recorded that 88 pounds of plutonium are produced each year at Dimona, which quantity can be used to make something between eight and ten bombs annually. Heavy water is necessary to this process, and the Norwegian delivery amounted to 20 tons. It was obtained against firm pledges that it would only be used for peaceful purposes. It was agreed that the Norwegian authorities could maintain rights of control and inspection over the uses to which the water was put. But Milhollin has established that, up to the moment of Vanunu’s revelations, no attempt was made from Oslo to monitor the observance of these pledges.

Heavy water

After the Sunday Times publication of the real situation at Dimona, the Norwegian Government requested Israel to allow an appropriate inspection of the uses of the heavy water. It proposed that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) should be invited to investigate and report. In September, the Israelis refused any such inspection. At the talks in question, the Israelis conceded that the heavy water was being used at Dimona, and that Plutonium was being produced with it. Per Paust, the spokesman of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry, has been reported as saying that the Israeli’s maintain that any IAEA report would be biased, and continue to insist that they have breached none of their obligations to Norway.

It seems that the rights of the Norwegian authorities, under international law, are comprehensive. Whether or not it can be proved that the heavy water from Norway was abused for military work, the Norwegians are entitled to the inspection for which they have asked. If tests establish that plutonium has been produced, then the Norwegians have the right to see the product, and if weapons have been manufactured they have the right to insist upon them being dismantled. Mr. Paust also believes that the water could be recalled, although no-one is quite sure how much other heavy water, from other sources, may have been supplied to Israel. What is known is that the Americans have furnished Israel with 3.9 tons, and that additional supplies have come from France. “French” heavy water originates either from the USA or Norway, and is theoretically subject to the same controls agreed between Norway and Israel. Therefore the French had no right to re-export it to Israel without permission, and any “French” heavy water used for military purposes could be recalled, not only by the French Government, but also by the American or Norwegian Governments.

Milhollin’s estimate is that Dimona uses 36 tons of heavy water. The American water has been under control since it was moved from Dimona, and the IAEA has inspected it. But it has not been tested to elucidate whether, while it was at Dimona, it was employed in Plutonium refinement. American experts did visit Dimona annually from 1963 to 1969, but they conducted none of the relevant tests, either.

If the Norwegian authorities persist in their enquiries, as they undoubtedly should, then it is evident that similar enquiries should be initiated by the French and American Governments. The IAEA should also be pressed to be more curious than it hitherto has been. All these questions are absolutely urgent, if the non-proliferation regime is to retain any credibility whatever.

But it is equally imperative to re-examine a whole history of nuclear co-operation between Israel and South Africa, with the same open-mindedness.

The nuclear test which took place in the South Atlantic on 22nd September 1979 was monitored by a United States satellite. The explosion, which gave off a characteristic double flash, took place at a height of eight kilometres, which is commensurate with the performance of the GS Howitzer, which has been manufactured in South Africa since the United States supplied Pretoria with a range of modern artillery delivery systems. The Americans have also supplied the South Africans with 300,000 shell casings, adequate to deliver a two to three kiloton nuclear device.

It has been confirmed that forces of the South African fleet were present in the South Atlantic in the area of the explosion at the time that it took place. And further, it is credibly alleged that the 1979 explosion was a joint Israeli-South African achievement, as necessary to the Israelis for verifying their technology as it was to the South Africans for threatening their neighbours. That the United Nations were persuaded to record a verdict of “not proven” about this explosion tells us a good deal about the respect of some of its experts for the rules of evidence.

Israel-South Africa

However, new evidence continually appears, and it would be instructive to reopen this enquiry in order to evaluate it. Since we now know that the allegations of Fuad Jabber, or the judgements, from a different perspective, of Robert E. Harkavy, were founded on realistic assumptions, it becomes necessary to evaluate the contemporary analyses of Israeli-South African cooperation, all over again.

Valuable evidence for such a new investigation has been presented by Jane Hunter in her most disturbing work on Israeli Foreign Policy.

“In 1965, after South Africa brought its Safari safeguarded reactor on line, Israeli scientists began advising South Africa on their Safari 2 research reactor. In 1968, Professor Ernst Bergmann, the ‘father’ of Israel’s nuclear program, went to South Africa and spoke strongly in favour of bilateral co-operation on the development of nuclear technology.

According to the authors of a novelized treatment of Israel’s nuclear program - barred from publication by the Israeli censor - as early as 1966, South Africa had invited Israel to use its land or ocean space for a nuclear weapons test. Led at that time by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, Israel declined the invitation. However, according to the Israeli authors, whose sources included Shimon Peres, an enthusiastic intimate of the Israeli nuclear program, and Knesset Member Eliyah Speizer, during his April 1976 visit to Israel Premier Vorster again extended the invitation to Israel to conduct a nuclear test.

It is commonly held that Israel wanted a test venue far from the Middle East in order to uphold its longtime position that it would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the region. This ‘position’, hinging on some arcane reading of the word ‘introduce’, is as meaningless as the endlessly heard term ‘peace process’.

The following year, a Soviet satellite picked up unmistakable signs of preparation for a nuclear test in the Kalahari Desert. Fearing that such a test ‘might trigger an ominous escalation of the nuclear arms race,’ the U.S., Britain, France and West Germany joined the USSR in pressuring South Africa to abort the test. As to the bomb that was to be tested, “‘I know some intelligence people who are convinced with damn near certainty that it was an Israeli nuclear device’, said a high-ranking Washington official.“

At three o’clock in the morning on September 22, 1979, Israel and South Africa conducted a nuclear weapons test where the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans merge. A newly recalibrated U.S. Vela intelligence satellite recorded the characteristic double flash of light. It was a small blast, designed to leave very little evidence. The CIA told the National Security Council that a two or three kiloton bomb had been exploded in ‘a joint South African-Israeli test’. A Navy official revealed that U.S. spy planes over the test area had been waved away by South African Navy ships and forced to land secretly in Australia. The CIA knew (and later told Congress) that South African ships were conducting secret maneuvers at the exact site of the test. The South African military attaché in Washington made the first ever request to the U.S. National Technical Information Service for a computer search on detection of nuclear explosions and orbits of the Vela satellite.

Almost immediately the Carter Administration convened a special panel to conduct an investigation of the incident. The panel heard reports from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and the CIA; and representatives of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Department of Energy and the State Department presented evidence to the panel supporting the occurrence of a nuclear explosion. Their findings were summarily dismissed by the Carter White House, which after a delay of seven months declared:

Although we cannot rule out the possibility that this (Vela) signal was of nuclear origin, the panel considers it more likely that the signal was one of the zoo events (reception of signals of unknown origin under anomalous circumstances), possibly a consequence of the impact of a small meteor on the satellite.

Moreover, as new information became available, it was simply ignored. In one critical instance, evidence of radiation observed in the thyroid glands of Australian sheep was discounted. The initial lack of this “smoking gun,” traces of radiation, suggested to a Los Alamos scientist that the low-yield weapon tested had been a neutron bomb. However, the Carter panel had used the absence of radiation as a prime excuse in its cover-up.

Many who had been involved with the investigation were aghast and wondered by the Carter White House was ‘equivocating’. Some within the government said that the Carter Administration was hiding behind the ‘zoo’ theory to avoid dealing with the political headaches that would accompany acknowledgement of the test. An affirmative report might have affected the ongoing negotiations over the creation of Zimbabwe in which South African co-operation was needed and upset the just negotiated Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt. Carter also had reasons to fear ‘complications in gathering Jewish votes during the upcoming Democratic Party primary campaign against Sen. Edward Kennedy.’

But beyond that, as a State Department official explained, coming clean on the test ‘would be a major turning point in our relations with South Africa and Israel if we determined conclusively that either had tested a nuclear bomb. It makes me terribly nervous just to think about it.’ Of course by deciding to ignore reality the Carter administration - and following in its footsteps, the Reagan administration,which went on record May 21, 1985 as upholding the Carter ‘verdict’ - destroyed the already tattered credibility of the nonproliferation posture of the U.S. There was no challenge forthcoming from Congress. Quite the contrary: in 1981 Representatives Stephen Solarz and Jonathan Bingham withdrew legislation they had introduced calling for a cutoff of U.S. aid to nations manufacturing nuclear weapons after they learned from the State Department “that such a requirement might well trigger a finding by the Administration that Israel has manufactured a bomb.” The U.S. government turned its back on the potential victims of Israeli and South African nuclear aggression and stuck its head in the sand like an ostrich.

Cover-up

Five years later, the Washington Office on Africa Educational Fund in cooperation with Congressman John Conyers (D-MI), the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and the World Campaign Against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South Africa issued a report on the 1979 nuclear weapons test. Based on documents obtained from the government under the Freedom of Information Act, the report detailed scientific evidence not taken into account by the Carter panel. It demonstrated conclusively that a cover-up had been perpetrated by the Carter Administration. Written by Howard University Professor Ronald Walters, the report warned that the cover-up, ‘coupled with the Reagan Administration’s subsequent allowance of an increase in nuclear aid to South Africa has serious implications for international peace and security.’

The sponsors of the report urged that the investigation be reopened under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineers, and also called for a Congressional investigation and ‘the release to the public of all pertinent information.

Of course whether enquiries are reopened in the USA, or the United Nations, or not, many African States are deeply uneasy about these events. Unsurprisingly, the conclusions which they have drawn reflect considerable alarm. A number of African countries have quite reasonably concluded that they are prospective candidates for nuclear bombardment by South Africa. No Government in the front-line states can possibly ignore this threat. Persistent cross-border military activity by the apartheid regime is a permanent fact of political life in the southern part of the African continent.

But it is not only in the front-line states that alarm bells have been ringing. As Oye Ogunbadejo informs us:

“Nigeria, for example, sees itself as ... a potential target. Lagos has consistently argued that any improvements in South Africa’s military power and nuclear capability, with the assistance of the west, pose direct military threats to Nigeria, and make it an open target of long-range nuclear attack. Alhaji Shehu Shagari, as President, continued to emphasise the need for his country to catch up with South Africa in the nuclear field. For the time being, however, Nigeria’s efforts are geared, essentially, towards energy purposes.”

Yet, Ogunbadejo cites other prominent African spokesmen who are very impatient with the restrictions of nuclear capacity to the civilian sector. Thus, Ali Mazrui is reported as a strong critic of the Non-Proliferation Treaty:

“From a third world point of view, I don’t believe the Treaty is worth the paper it is written on. And if I were to become President of a third world country, I would not hesitate to withdraw from it. Imperialism in the nuclear age is the monopoly stage of nuclear technology.”

Mazrui foresees an alliance of black South Africa with Nigeria and Zaire, which would develop its own African ‘deterrent’.

“Africa under its triumvirate of diplomatic leaders partly endowed with nuclear credentials, will have begun to enter the main stream of global affairs. And the world as a whole, once it discovers the lunacy of its nuclear ways, will have learned an old lesson in a new context: the lesson that wild mushrooms are dangerous.”

Of course, the attitude of the Government of Free South Africa cannot yet be determined. Fortunately, for many years, progressive people throughout the African continent have given their support to the goal of a nuclear-free zone in the whole region. Kwame Nkrumah froze all French assets because of the tests in the Sahara desert during 1961. At the same time, Nigeria severed its diplomatic contact with France. The advent of the Non-proliferation Treaty was perhaps more keenly welcomed in Africa than in any other sector of the globe. Ogunbadejo believes that only a major initiative towards nuclear disarmament by the great powers can maintain this kind of wider global commitment.

“In the maintenance of future world order, the close co-operation and understanding between the superpowers and the other states with nuclear weapons is an essential precondition.”

In small things and big

The advent of the Gorbachev-Reagan summits, and the conclusion of a Treaty to dismantle intermediate nuclear forces, welcome though it is, nonetheless arrives after the eleventh hour, when we consider the savage implications of the problems of proliferation. Conventional theories of deterrence are deeply flawed, and nowhere more than in their standard presumption of a bipolar model of nuclear confrontation. In a crude way, several thousand warheads may, when confronted by several thousand other warheads, determine a certain kind of behaviour. No such determination may be presumed, however, once proliferation has extended to the ‘pariah’ states. In the hot spots which include and surround these states, there is sufficient turbulence to encourage the insane idea that nuclear weapons can be useful as means of actual warfare. What elsewhere would be normal restraints of public opinion are here conspicuously absent.

We have more than a little evidence that neither domestic nor international law controls the potential responses of such governments.

In small things, the Israeli Government kidnaps its opponents, and visits exemplary repression upon them. In large things, it misleads the United Nations and extends the threat of nuclear destruction to two of the most dangerous areas in the contemporary world.

It is hardly surprising that good people who are facing such threats may flinch in their commitment to oppose all or any reliance on nuclear weapons. Thus, Ogunbadejo tells us:

“Edem Kodjo, the last substantive Secretary-General of the Organization of African Unity, caused quite a stir at the 19th summit during June 1983 in Addis Ababa, when he militantly urged African Governments to match ‘South Africa’s nuclear mights’: ‘it is the duty of member states which are able to resolutely embark on the nuclear path to do so. “‘

Nuclear proliferation is the tragic reductio ad absurdem of deterrence theory. That old cynic, Harold Macmillan, cogently expressed the problem:

“If all this capacity for destruction is spread around the world in the hands of all kinds of different characters dictators, reactionaries, revolutionaries, madmen - then sooner or later, and certainly, I think by the end of the century, either by error or insanity, the great crime will be committed.”

The Non-Proliferation Treaty, and the idea of nuclear-free zones, can neither of them continue unaffected by the nuclearization of the military forces of Israel and South Africa. If there is still time to maintain the civilized commitment of Africa and the Arab world to non-nuclear defence policies, it must be evident that that time is rapidly speeding away. Mordechai Vanunu has removed the last veil which had been concealing this ugly situation.

Now, in order to survive, the Non-Proliferation regime must discover how to disarm Israel and South Africa of their nuclear bludgeons. A failure to confront this intransigent issue may not at once create the field full of dragon’s teeth which will eventually grow. Problems of resources and technology will ensure an uneven development of nuclear military potential. But here, we are talking about something more fundamental than budget allocations: at stake is the whole question of the political will for peace and disarmament, as well as the deep-rooted problem of social justice. If the rest of the world abandons the front-line states to South African intimidation, including nuclear intimidation all Africa will conclude that Ali Mazrui is right. If everyone outside the Middle East remains deaf to the process which is now reopening behind locked doors in Jerusalem, then the call for an Arab bomb will become irresistible. We are members of one another, and it is at critical moments like the present that it becomes necessary to demonstrate this fact.

So widespread is the international movement for peace, that the Third United Nations Special Session on Disarmament will see continued healthy pressures for the destruction of nuclear weapons, and the extension of ever wider nuclear-free territorial agreements. Yet, it seems to me, that all these events provide us with a powerful argument that disarmament can no longer be left to governments.

There are widespread debates about the need for reform of the United Nations system, and many new proposals are emerging from the different peace movements, as they experience the weaknesses and limitations of the inherited UN system. Even within the old system, however, many voices have been raised for the creation of a new information order, as a pre-condition for an enlightened and active world public opinion.

The confrontation between Israel and its neighbours, the plight of the Palestinian people, and the abscess of apartheid are both major parts of a global crisis of militarism. This is worsening as a result of economic crisis, contraction and collapse. If the Stock Exchange crash leads through trade wars to the explosion of the world’s debt bomb, then the present proliferation of nuclear weapons is a perfect formula for Armageddon. No-one can tell where conflict will spill over, once any of these sinister devices are detonated.

So urgent is this problem that nothing less than a worldwide popular movement is needed to meet it. It cannot be left to the immediate victims of these new nuclear threats, to protest and appeal in isolation. “Send ye not”, said our English poet John Donne, “to know for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for thee”.

* * *

In warning us of these perils, Mordechai Vanunu has earned our support and help. Writing from his confinement, he sent me this inspiring message:

“I hope you received my last letters to you. Last week I received the autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Thank you very much. In this very interesting book I find I share some things in common with the life of Russell. I am also governed by unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.

I believe many people would like to do more for those who suffer without reason, like all the refugees in the world. I tried to help them when I was a student. This activity guides me to my next action.

Even now in these inhumane prison conditions, I feel good, because I believe I did my duty and followed my conscience.

I am happy to know that many people support and understand what I did, and my hope is that more people will do more things to stop nuclear proliferation throughout the world.

We are now in a great moment when the US and the USSR are signing an agreement to reduce nuclear weaponry in Europe. This is a good step in the right direction: to destroy all the nuclear weapons in the world.

I want to thank you for your action for peace, and for spreading news of my case to more people.”

I do not think that humanity will ignore or forget the plight of this good man. In organizing solidarity with him, we shall continually remind the world of the menace against which he warned.