Det danske Fredsakademi
Kronologi over fredssagen og international politik 25. Juni
2013 / Time Line June 25, 2013
Version 3.0
24. Juni 2013, 26. Juni 2013
06/25/2013
The Israel-Argentina Yellowcake Connection
Previously Secret Documents Show That Canadian Intelligence
Discovered That Israel Purchased Yellowcake from Argentines during
1963-1964
Information Later Shared with British and Americans, Who Accepted
It after Hesitation
U.S. State Department Insisted that Uranium Sales Required
Safeguards to Assure Peaceful Use but Israel Was Uncooperative and
Evasive About the Yellowcake's Ultimate Use
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 432
Washington, D.C., June 25, 2013 -- During 1963-64, the Israeli
government secretly acquired 80-100 tons of Argentine uranium oxide
("yellowcake") for its nuclear weapons program, according to U.S.
and British archival documents published today for the first time
jointly by the National Security Archive, the Nuclear Proliferation
International History Project, and the James Martin Center for
Nonproliferation Studies. The U.S. government learned about the
sale through Canadian intelligence and found out even more from its
Embassy in Argentina. Washington was concerned that the yellowcake
purchase cast doubts on Israel's claims about a peaceful nuclear
program. In response to U.S. diplomatic queries about the sale, the
government of Israel was evasive in its replies and gave no answers
to the U.S.'s questions about the transaction.
The U.S. government learned about the facts of the sale through
Canadian intelligence and found out even more from its Embassy in
Argentina. The government of Israel avoided giving answers to any
questions about the yellowcake purchase.
These nearly unknown documents shed light on one of the most
obscure aspects of Israel's nuclear history--how secretly and
vigorously Israel sought raw materials for its nuclear program and
how persistently it tried to cultivate relations with certain
nuclear suppliers. Yellowcake, a processed uranium ore, was
critically important to Israel for fuelling its nuclear reactor at
Dimona and thereby producing plutonium for weapons. The story of
the Argentine yellowcake sale to Israel has remained largely
unknown in part because Israel has gone to great lengths to keep
tight secrecy to this day about how and where it acquired raw
materials for its nuclear program. Moreover, the U.S. government
and its close allies kept secret for years what they knew at the
time.
That Argentina made the yellowcake sale to Israel has been
disclosed in declassified U.S. intelligence estimates, but how and
when Washington learned about the sale and how it reacted to it can
now be learned from largely untapped archival sources. Among the
disclosures in today's publication:
* French restrictions on Israel's supply of uranium in 1963 made
U.S. and British officials suspect that Israel would attempt to
acquire yellowcake from other sources without any tangible
restrictions to sustain its nuclear weapons program.
* A Canadian intelligence report from March 1964 asserted Israel
had all of the "prerequisites for commencing a modest nuclear
weapons development project."
* When the Canadians discovered the Argentine-Israeli deal they
were initially reluctant to share the intelligence with Washington
because the United States had refused to provide them with
information on a recent U.S. inspection visit by U.S. scientists to
Dimona.
* U.S. and British intelligence were skeptical of the Canadian
finding until the U.S. Embassy sources in Argentina confirmed the
sale to Israel.
* The Israelis would not answer questions about the transaction.
When U.S. scientists visited the Dimona facility in March 1965 to
check whether the Israelis were meeting peaceful uses commitments,
they asked about the yellowcake but their Israeli hosts said that
question was for "higher officials."
* In 1964 U.S. officials tried to persuade the Argentines to apply
strong safeguards to future uranium exports but had little traction
for securing agreement.
* In 1965, while the CIA and the State Department were
investigating the Argentine yellowcake sale, Washington pursued
rumors that the French uranium mining company in Gabon had sought
permission to sell yellowcake to Israel.
Since late 1960 when the CIA learned that the Israelis had been
constructing, with French assistance, a nuclear reactor near Dimona
in the Negev Desert, the United States and close allies (and the
Soviet Union as well) worried that Israel had a nuclear weapons
program under way. The Canadian government was also concerned;
sometime in the spring of 1964 its intelligence agency learned
about the yellowcake sale and shared the information with the
British.
Convinced that the Canadian information confirmed Israel's interest
in nuclear weapons, a British diplomat calculated that the
yellowcake would enable the Israelis to use their Dimona nuclear
reactor to produce enough plutonium for its first nuclear weapon
within 20 months. In light of these concerns, the British shared
the information with the U.S. government; both governments, as well
as Canada, were concerned about stability in the Middle East, which
the Israeli nuclear program could threaten. Both Washington and
London wanted yellowcake sales safeguarded to curb the spread of
nuclear weapons capabilities to other countries.
As the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada always had done
in the past with intelligence information about the Israeli nuclear
program, they kept the entire yellowcake sale secret. On this
matter there were no leaks; the issue never reached the U.S. media
then or later.
The documents in today's publication are from the U.S. and the
British National Archives. All of the U.S. documents were
declassified in the mid-1990s but have lingered in a relatively
obscure folder in the State Department's central foreign policy
files at the U.S. National Archives. They may never have been
displayed in public before as the file appeared to be previously
untouched. A few of the British documents have been cited by other
historians, including ourselves, but the fascinating story of
British-Canadian-United States intelligence cooperation and
coordination has also been buried in relative obscurity. The
juxtaposition of U.S. and British records makes a fuller account
possible, although some elements of the story remain secret, such
as the identity of the Canadian intelligence source on the
yellowcake purchase. Only Israeli and Argentine documents, however,
can provide the full story of the yellowcake sale.
06/25/2013
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