Nukes in the Negev : THE SAMSON OPTION: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy, <i> By Seymour M. Hersh (Random House: $23; 333 pp.)</i>

“And Samson said, ‘ Let me die with the Philistines. ‘ And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. “

--Judges, 17:30

Late in 1958, during a Middle East crisis, an American U-2 reconnaissance plane snapped a series of fateful photographs over a quiet corner of the Negev desert in southern Israel. Analyzed by experts back in Washington, the pictures showed the first telltale signs of what would be the Israeli nuclear reactor and weapons center at Dimona.

In a stunning new book, Seymour Hersh now reveals the hidden history unfolding from that discovery: more than three decades of international intrigue and betrayal, of craven politics and bureaucratic irresponsibility, with few parallels even in our cynical age. From the moment of its release, “The Samson Option” has been something of a sensation in Israel, Europe and the United States, instantly provoking more than a dozen libel actions and several countersuits by the author, but also much independent confirmation of major episodes in the story.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and most other awards in the field, Hersh is widely regarded as the preeminent reporter--some would say the only genuinely investigative journalist--excavating the still arcane precincts of national security and foreign policy. Like his five earlier books, this one bristles with authenticity, founded on exhaustive interviewing and documentation likely to make the publicized lawsuits token gestures.

Yet in our media-drenched era, when reporting dross so often devalues the gold, there is decided danger in categorizing this work only as the startling expose it is. Above all, Hersh’s is a deadly serious history of the real world of foreign affairs, beyond the official statements and photo opportunities, the spoon-fed stand-up reports.

Between those first U-2 sightings of 1958 and a near countdown to atomic attack during last winter’s Persian Gulf War, Israel furtively became a thermonuclear power, its missiles and bombers targeted on the Soviet Union as well as on Arab states in a 6,000-mile radius, its hair-trigger arsenal aided, condoned and willfully ignored by a long succession of U.S. administrations.

Almost from the beginning, as Hersh chillingly documents, Israel’s nuclear strategy would be predicated on a deliberate threat and provocation of planetary Armageddon. In extremis, faced with the prospect of defeat and presumed extermination by the Arabs, the Israelis would launch on the Soviets and every other adversary within reach, igniting general nuclear war. With biblical aptness, the warheads and bombs would be called “Temple” weapons, the policy “The Samson Option.”

Hersh composes the top-secret, tangled sequence in all its richness and irony, and with a cast of characters few novelists could summon--the chain-smoking son of a Berlin rabbi who becomes the godfather of Dimona; a collection of wealthy American and European Jews financing the arsenal while politically coercing several occupants of the White House to overlook it; literally generations of U.S. bureaucrats who variously abetted and covered up the machinations of a foreign power; a half-mad, anti-Semitic CIA official who hounds his Jewish colleagues while winking at the “Temple” weaponry; a spy for Israel who had grown up in South Bend, Ind., with fantasies of being an Israeli colonel and gone on to the highest levels of U.S. intelligence; a gluttonous, wheezing U.S. ambassador to Israel in yellowing white suits, making a fetish of a woman who rejected him a long time ago, and a constant practice over a dozen years of repressing reports on Israeli nuclear arms.

Episode after episode, as the stockpile grows, there is a numbing sense of the hypocrisy and treachery that poisoned the policies of both Israel and the United States. While publicly proclaiming their devotion to arms control and the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, American Presidents habitually lie and are lied to about the issue. When U.S. inspectors are finally allowed to see Dimona under a secret agreement in 1962, the Israelis claim it is only for peaceful purposes, and annually for eight years construct an elaborate Potemkin Village to conceal the weapons work.

Meanwhile, U.S. intelligence is little more than a tragicomic train of blunders--photographs never seen, files unremembered, reports waylaid and suppressed, and all the while a wanton, self-protective pandering to the political cowardice of superiors. “Whenever you get something on the Israelis and move it along,” Hersh quotes one intelligence analyst, “you’d better be careful. Especially if you’ve got a career.” Or the moral learned by others who tried to bring out the accumulating truth about the Dimona arsenal: “There was little to be gained by relaying information that those at the top did not want to know.”

The lethal threshold is finally crossed in the Nixon years when the President and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, still publicly advocating non-proliferation, give the Israelis what Hersh and his many inside sources call an American “carte blanche” for the Samson Option, and make questioning or even discussing the subject a bureaucratic “taboo.”

There follows the Carter regime, ineffectually trying to stem the spread of nuclear arms while ignoring for political reasons a joint Israeli-South African nuclear test, and giving the Israelis super-secret satellite intelligence which they will use for targeting the Soviet Union.

Late in 1983, the Israeli prime ministership passes to Yitzhak Shamir, a former intelligence operative who, according to Hersh’s Israeli sources, “viscerally disliked the United States.” Shamir builds the Dimona arsenal apace with long-range missiles, while overseeing a flood of espionage material from Jonathan Pollard, an American recruited by the Israelis in a crucial job in U.S. naval intelligence. In one of the book’s more searing passages, Hersh describes from multiple Israeli and other sources how Shamir also ingratiates himself with the Soviets by giving them some of the most sensitive secrets stolen from the United States.

It is, altogether, a seedy tale of low life in high places. But Hersh handles brilliantly the accompanying evolution of Israeli politics and personalities, the fateful coincidence of the gathering Dimona arsenal with the emergence of a national-security state in Israel increasingly immune to democratic debate or restraint. He is masterful, too, at the subtle, all-important connections between events obscure and famous: the February, 1955, Israeli raid on Gaza and the next year’s Suez crisis; the French defeat by the Vietnamese at Dienbienphu in 1954 and the birth of Dimona; Ronald Reagan’s blithe ineptness and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982.

His research also dispels the omnipresent, long-since-irrelevant “Jewish factor” in the haunted saga of U.S.-Israeli relations. Jewish himself, Hersh draws on a number of American Jewish and Israeli sources, reporting anti-Semitism in the same ugly nakedness as he records the manipulations or “duel loyalty” of zealots for Israel. If “The Samson Option” makes anything clear, it is that U.S. policy toward Israel is no longer an issue of ethnicity, religion, culture or even the ghastly history of the Holocaust, but of two distinct nations, bound by some common ties yet distinguished by deeply separate interests in the world of the 1990s. “Should Israel, because of its widespread and emotional support in America,” Hersh puts it concisely, “be held to a different moral standard than Pakistan or North Korea or South Africa?”

In the end, of course, this sordid history is the stuff of tomorrow’s headlines, the ghost in the rafters at the Middle East peace talks, the mockery traveling in the baggage of U.N. inspectors as they hunt down the Iraqi nuclear peril. Meanwhile, Dimona goes on to a new generation of weapons: bomb-pumped X-ray lasers, hydrodynamics, radiation transport. Ever more captive of marginal parties representing a handful of the electorate, an Israeli cabinet fingers the last great nuclear trigger of the post-Cold War world. Ever closer to their own nuclear weapons with the international rummage sales of nuclear technology by a collapsed Soviet Union, the Arabs will do no less.

Much of this needless danger, Seymour Hersh makes clear, has been made in the United States. If Jewish or Arab children of the Middle East are to be incinerated one day in a blinding flash of light, at least we will not have far to look for those responsible.