2.4 KiB
| category | tags | summary | born | died | location | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence & Government |
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Assistant Secretary of Defense who pressured Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and directly confronted Israel about its nuclear weapons program. | 1920-01-31 | 2001-10-31 | Webster, Massachusetts |
Paul C. Warnke served as the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs. He was involved in intense pressure on Israel to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in exchange for F-4 fighter jets. Seymour Hersh wrote that Warnke directly questioned Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel's ambassador to Washington, D.C., about Israel's nuclear capabilities, stating, "we are shocked at the manner in which you are dealing with us.… You, our close ally, are building nuclear bombs in Israel behind our back."1
Israeli F-4 negotiations, 1968
In the fall of 1968, Warnke conducted the negotiations with Rabin over the sale of F-4 Phantom aircraft. On November 22, 1968, in Warnke's office, Rabin said that a paragraph of the draft memorandum of understanding made it appear that the United States considered Israel "the bad guy." Warnke took issue with the reading and said that he had discussed the paragraph with Clark Clifford and Clifford with Dean Rusk, and that the government did not put that construction on it. Warnke asked Rabin: "Suppose you deliver nuclear weapons in these aircraft in ten years time?"2 On November 27, 1968, Warnke wrote to Rabin that the United States agreed to sell Israel fifty F-4 Phantom aircraft, and the letter recorded the Israeli government's reaffirmation of its policy "that it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons."3
Footnotes
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 14. ↩︎
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Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XX, Arab-Israeli Dispute, 1967-1968, Document 330, Memorandum of Conversation, Washington, November 22, 1968. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v20/d330 ↩︎
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Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XX, Document 333, Letter from Assistant Secretary of Defense Warnke to Ambassador Rabin, Washington, November 27, 1968. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v20/d333 ↩︎