on the nuclear question in the Middle East, changed the direction of my
research. In 1991-92, while I codirected the MIT Project on Arms Control in the
Middle East, I wrote and published numerous policy-oriented working papers
and op-ed articles. I also began to write a book, with Marvin Miller of MIT, on
nuclear weapons proliferation in the Middle East.

By 1992-93 I came to two realizations about my research. First, I became con-
vinced of the importance of understanding the evolution of Israel's nuclear
opacity. I concluded that Israel's nuclear past was not only fascinating for his-
torians, but that it also constrained the possibility of future arms control in the
Middle East in ways that are not often appreciated by analysts and policy mak-
ers. Second, I discovered that archival material was becoming available to
reconstruct the political history of Israel's nuclear weapons program.

These realizations changed the project's focus and methodology. It became
primarily historical, focusing on the origins and evolution of Israel's nuclear
opacity. The method is historical reconstruction and interpretation. The mate-
rials are mainly primary sources: declassified archival materials, oral testi-
monies, memoirs, and press clippings. Much of the archival material I discov-
ered in Israel, the United States, and Norway is presented here for the first time.

On the Israeli side, the Israel State Archives (ISA) in Jerusalem, in accord
with its thirty-year declassification policy, has opened almost all the Foreign
Ministry's documents (cataloged under Foreign Ministry Record Groups, or
FMRG) for the period before 1966. There I also discovered most of the corre-
spondence on nuclear issues between President John E. Kennedy and Israeli
Prime Ministers David Ben Gurion and Levi Eshkol.

Other Israeli archives were also useful. Many of Ben Gurion's personal
diaries and letters have been declassified and are now available at the David Ben
Gurion Archive (DBGA)> at the Ben Gurion Research Center at Sdeh Boker. In
the Weizmann Institute's archives in Rehovot I found documents on the birth
of the nuclear physics department at the Institute and the break, in the early
1950s, of several Israeli nuclear physicists with the Ministry of Defense. In the
nearby Yad Chaim Weizmann Archive I found documents referring to Ben
Gurion's scientific adviser and the founder of the Israel Atomic Energy Com-
mission (IAEC), Ernst David Bergmann.

The remaining portion of this research was conducted in the United States,
since Israel's nuclear opacity was a result of a symbiotic American-Israeli effort
to respond to their respective concerns about nuclear weapons and prolifera-
tion. In the last few years most of the American documents relevant to the evo-
lution of Israel's nuclear opacity have been declassified, covering the period
until 1970. Until then most of the relevant archival material was either sanitized
or unavailable. In 1992 Virginia Foran of the Carnegie Endowment for

-x-