Balder Ex-Libris

Author : Cohen Avner
Title : Israel and Chemical-Biological Weapons : History, Deterrence, and Arms Control
Year : 2001

Link download : Cohen_Avner_-_Israel_and_Chemical-Biological_Weapons.zip

Dr. Avner Cohen is Senior Fellow at the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland, as well as the Program on Security and Disarmament, at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Israel and the Bomb (New York Columbia University Press, 1998). In April 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, wrote a letter to Ehud Avriel, one of the Jewish Agency’s operatives in Europe, ordering him to seek out and recruit East European Jewish scientists who could “either increase the capacity to kill masses or to cure masses; both are important.”2 One of the scientists Avriel recruited was a 30-year old epidemiologist and colonel in the Red Army named Avraham Marcus Klingberg. In time, Klingberg became one of Israel’s leading scientists in the area of chemical and biological weapons (CBW). He was among the founding members and, subsequently, the deputy director of the Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona, a dozen miles southeast of Tel Aviv. Decades later in 1983, Professor Klingberg was secretly arrested, tried, and convicted as a Soviet spy. It took another decade until the espionage case at IIBR—one of Israel’s most sensitive defense research facilities—was publicized. To this day, the Israeli security establishment treats all details of the Klingberg case as highly classified.3 Until the news of Klingberg’s arrest and imprisonment was published, there was almost no public reference to Israel’s CBW programs. The limited disclosures about the Klingberg espionage case, as well as the 1991 Gulf War and the subsequent revelations about Iraq’s chemical and biological programs, have aroused public curiosity and speculation regarding Israel’s capabilities in the CBW field. Yet details about these programs—their history, strategic rationale, and technical capabilities—remain shrouded in secrecy. A comparison with Israel’s nuclear weapons (NW) program highlights this point. Although Israel has not acknowledged possessing NW and has declared that it “will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East,” the existence of the Israeli bomb has been the world’s worst kept secret since about 1970.4 That is not the case, however, for Israel’s other potential non-conventional capabilities, especially biological weapons (BW). To this day, the Israeli government has issued no policy statement on biological arms control, and it has neither signed nor ratified the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). ...