Israel Broke Vow on Peaceful Use of Atom Technology, Professor Says

Israel has broken its pledge on the peaceful use of atomic technology to build a nuclear arsenal, and other countries--including India and Pakistan--could soon follow, a professor charged in an article Wednesday.

“It now appears--for the first time in history--that a country has broken the peaceful-use pledge,” Gary Milhollin of the University of Wisconsin wrote in Foreign Policy, a quarterly widely read in diplomatic circles.

“It also appears that a second country may have broken it, that a third is threatening to break it and that the civilian exports of a fourth . . . have gone freely into bombs,” Milhollin wrote.

The professor accused Israel of the flat violation and identified the “second country” as France, the third as India and the fourth as Norway.

The article by Milhollin, a former Defense Department official, charged that Israel reneged on pledges made to Norway, the United States and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The pledges involve the use of heavy water, a liquid that looks like water but is rich in deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen.

According to Milhollin’s article, France, which received the nuclear data from the United States, gave Israel the technical knowledge to create a nuclear explosive device. The required uranium came from South Africa and from the hijacking of a Belgian ship in the Mediterranean. More difficult to obtain was the heavy water, which is expensive and difficult to produce.

The article said Israel imported 20 tons of heavy water from Norway and another 3.9 tons from the United States.