Nuclear Missiles on Israeli subs ‘confirmed’ by Der Spiegel

By in Israel - Nuclear weapons, Proliferation on June 5th, 2012

Nuclear weapons are deployed on the Dolphin submarines that Germany gives to  Israel, with the knowledge of  the German government, according to a long Der Spiegel investigation.  Spiegel also says  that Germany knew of and probably helped finance development of  Israel’s first bombs in the 1960s, with an unaudited contribution of 630 million Deuchmarks.  It points out that arms sales to Israel break German export laws.  And apparently Merkel’s  secret deal (in 2012) to pay 30% of the cost of the sixth Dolphin was conditional on Israel stopping west bank settlement expansion.

full article at:

Operation Samson: Israels Deployment of Nuclear Missiles on Subs from Germany – SPIEGEL ONLINE .

Some excerpts from the long article are  below:

06/04/2012 06:11 PM

Many have wondered for years about the exact capabilities of the submarines Germany exports to Israel. Now, experts in Germany and Israel have confirmed that nuclear-tipped missiles have been deployed on the vessels. And the German government has long known about it. By SPIEGEL

Research SPIEGEL has conducted in Germany, Israel and the United States, among current and past government ministers, military officials, defense engineers and intelligence agents, no longer leaves any room for doubt: With the help of German maritime technology, Israel has managed to create for itself a floating nuclear weapon arsenal: submarines equipped with nuclear capability.

To this day, the German government is sticking to its position that it does not know anything about an Israeli nuclear weapons program.

 

‘Purposes of Nuclear Capability’

But now, former top German officials have admitted to the nuclear dimension for the first time. “I assumed from the very beginning that the submarines were supposed to be nuclear-capable,” says Hans Rühle, the head of the planning staff at the German Defense Ministry in the late 1980s. Lothar Rühl, a former state secretary in the Defense Ministry, says that he never doubted that “Israel stationed nuclear weapons on the ships.” And Wolfgang Ruppelt, the director of arms procurement at the Defense Ministry during the key phase, admits that it was immediately clear to him that the Israelis wanted the ships “as carriers for weapons of the sort that a small country like Israel cannot station on land.” Top German officials speaking under the protection of anonymity were even more forthcoming. “From the beginning, the boats were primarily used for the purposes of nuclear capability,” says one ministry official with knowledge of the matter.

…

Franz-Josef Strauss and the Beginnings of Illegal Arms Cooperation

Those who subscribe to this logic are often prepared to violate Germany’s arms export laws. Ever since the era of Konrad Adenauer, the country’s first postwar leader, German chancellors have pushed through various military deals with Israel without parliamentary approval, kept the Federal Security Council in the dark or, as then Defense Minister Franz-Josef Strauss, a member of the conservative Christian Social Union (CSU), did, personally dropped off explosive equipment. …In December 1957, Strauss met with a small Israeli delegation for a discussion at his home near Rosenheim in Bavaria. The most prominent member of the Israeli group was the man who, in the following decades, would become the key figure in Israel’s arms deals with Germany, as well as the father of the Israeli atomic bomb: Shimon Peres, who would later become Israel’s prime minister and is the current Israeli president today, at the age of 88.

 

No Clear Legal  Basis for early conventional arms shipments

It is now known that the arms shipments began by no later than 1958. The German defense minister even had arms and equipment secretly removed from Germany military stockpiles and then reported to the police as stolen.

Many of the shipments reached Israel via indirect routes and were declared as “loans.” The equipment included Sikorsky helicopters, Noratlas transport aircraft, rebuilt M-48 tanks, anti-aircraft guns, howitzers and anti-tank guided missiles.

There was “no clear legal or budgetary basis” for the shipments,” a German official admitted in an internal document at the time. But Adenauer backed his defense minister.

 

DID THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT FINANCE THE ISRAELI NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM?

[Peres was in charge of Operation Samson to build the Israeli bomb in the 1960s]   The goal of the operation was to build an atomic bomb. The Israelis told their allies that they needed cheap nuclear energy for seawater desalination, and that they planned to use the water to make the Negev Desert fertile.

The German government was also left in the dark at first — with Strauss being the likely exception. The CSU politician was apparently brought into the loop in 1961. This is suggested by a memo dated June 12, 1961, classified as “top secret,” which Strauss dictated after a meeting in Paris with Peres and Ben-Gurion, in which he wrote: “Ben-Gurion spoke about the production of nuclear weapons.”

One can speculate on the reasons that Ben-Gurion, a Polish-born Israeli social democrat, chose to include the Bavarian conservative Strauss in his plans. There are indications that the Israeli government hoped to receive financial assistance for Operation Samson.

Israel was cash-strapped at the time, with the construction of the bomb consuming enormous sums of money. This led Ben-Gurion to negotiate in great secrecy with Adenauer over a loan worth billions. According to the German negotiation records, which the federal government has now released in response to a request by SPIEGEL, Ben-Gurion wanted to use the loan for an infrastructure project in the Negev Desert. There was also talk of a “sea water desalination plant.”

No Reason for Concern

Plants for a civilian desalination plant operated with nuclear power did in fact exist, and the development of the Negev was also one of the largest projects in Israel’s brief history. When Rainer Barzel, the conservatives’ parliamentary floor leader, inquired about the project in Jerusalem, the Israelis explained that obtaining water through desalination was an “epochal task.” An official who accompanied Barzel noted that the Israelis had said that “the necessary nuclear power would be monitored internationally and could not be used for military purposes, and that we had no reason to be concerned.”

But a desalination plant operated with nuclear power was never built, and it remains unclear what exactly happened with the total of 630 million deutsche marks that Germany gave the Israelis in the period until 1965. The payments were processed by the Frankfurt-based Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (Reconstruction Credit Institute). The head of the organization said in internal discussions that the use of the funds was “never audited.” “Everything seems to suggest that the Israeli bomb was financed also with German money,” says Avner Cohen, an Israeli historian at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California who studies nuclear weapons.

‘An Inconceivable Scenario’
In particular Moshe Arens, who was appointed defense minister in 1990, fought to stop the agreement [initially that Israel would pay a considerable amount for the first two submarines] — with success. On Nov. 30, 1990, the Israelis notified the shipyard in Kiel that it wished to withdraw from the contract.
Was the dream of nuclear second-strike capability lost? By no means.
In January 1991, the US air force attacked Iraq, and then Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein reacted by firing modified Scud missiles at Tel Aviv and Haifa. The bombardment lasted almost six weeks. Gas masks, some of which came from Germany, were distributed to households. “It was an inconceivable scenario,” recalls Ehud Barak, the current Israeli defense minister. During those days, Jewish immigrants from Russia arrived, “and we had to hand them gas masks at the airport to protect them against rockets that the Iraqis had built with the help of the Russians and the Germans.”
A few days after the Scud missile bombardment began, a German military official requested a meeting at the Chancellery, presented a secret report and emptied the contents of a bag onto a table. He spread out dozens of electronic parts, components of a control system and the percussion fuse of the modified Scud missiles. They had one thing in common: They were made in Germany. Without German technology there would have been no Scuds, and without Scuds no dead Israelis.
Once again, Germany bore some of the responsibility, and that was also the message that Hanan Alon, a senior Israeli Defense Ministry official, brought to Kohl during a visit to Bonn shortly after the war began. “It would be unpleasant if it came out, through the media, that Germany helped Iraq to make poison gas, and then supplied us with the equipment against it, Mr. Chancellor,” Alon said. According to Israeli officials, Alon also issued an open threat, saying: “You are certainly aware that the words gas and Germany don’t sound very good together.”
The Shipyards of Kiel
The Germans got the message. “Israel-Germany-gas” would sound like a “horrible triad” in the rest of the world, then Foreign Minister Genscher warned in an internal memo.
On Jan. 30, 1991, two weeks after the beginning of the Gulf War, the German government agreed to supply Israel with armaments worth 1.2 billion deutsche marks. This included the complete financing of two submarines with 880 million deutsche marks. The budgetary miracle had come to pass. Israel had found its benefactor.
… Every German administration has been keenly aware of how explosive the issue is. When the German Finance Ministry had to report the funds for the financing of submarines 4 and 5 in 2006, the ministry officials were clearly squirming. The planned weapons system is “not suitable for the use of missiles equipped with nuclear warheads. The submarines are therefore not being constructed and equipped for launching nuclear weapons,” reads a classified document from Finance Ministry State Secretary Karl Diller to the Bundestag budget committee dated Aug. 29, 2006.
…
[German export laws prohibit arms sales to Israel]
From the start, Merkel viewed the matter differently from her predecessor Schröder, who approved the delivery of submarines number 4 and 5 on his last working day in office in 2005. For Chancellor Merkel, on the other hand, there was never any doubt that she would do what Israel asked, even at the cost of violating Germany’s own arms export guidelines. The rules, amended in 2000 by the SPD-Green coalition government, do allow weapons to be supplied to countries that are not part of the EU or NATO in the case of “special foreign or security policy interests.” But there is a clear regulation for crisis regions: The rules state that supplying weapons “is not authorized in countries that are involved in armed conflicts or where there is a threat of one.” There is no question that that rule would include Israel. But that did not stop the chancellor from making a deal for the delivery of submarine number 6 — just as she was not deterred by Netanyahu’s unwillingness to make compromises.
.
…
[The 6th submarine contract with Merkel]
…Merkel’s response [to Netanyahu's request for another fuel-cell submarine]  included three specific requests in exchange. First, Israel should halt its policy of settlement expansion, and second, the government should release tax assets it had frozen, which belong to the Palestinian National Authority. Third, Israel must allow construction of a sewage treatment plant in the Gaza Strip, funded by Germany, to continue. The critical factor, the chancellor added, was absolute discretion. If details leaked out, the deal would be off, because resistance from the Bundestag would be too much to overcome. The two leaders agreed that German diplomat Christoph Heusgen and Netanyahu’s security advisor Uzi Arad would work out the details.
Ultimately, Ben-Zeev and Heusgen agreed on the final details over the phone, and the contract was signed on March 20, 2012, at the Israeli ambassador’s residence in Berlin. Defense Minister Barak flew in especially for the meeting and Rüdiger Wolf, a state secretary in the Federal Defense Ministry, signed on behalf of the German government. Since the Israeli government had financial problems once again, Germany made further concessions, agreeing to pay €135 million ($170 million), a third of the submarine’s cost, and to allow Israel to defer payment of its part until 2015. Netanyahu dutifully expressed his thanks with a hand-written letter.
Still, disappointment within the Chancellery is running high, as Netanyahu has simply ignored Merkel’s requests. Israel’s policy of settlement continues unabated and no further progress has been made on the sewage treatment plant. The Israeli government only released the Palestinian tax money. Merkel has apparently reached the conclusion that there’s no point in saying anything further to Netanyahu, since he’s sure not to listen in any case.

 

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