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President Kennedy's science adviser who was deliberately excluded from intelligence about Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor at David Ben-Gurion's request. | 1915-05-30 | 1994-10-21 | Detroit, Michigan |
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Jerome B. Wiesner was President John F. Kennedy's science adviser. He was Jewish, but was totally cut out of the intelligence about Dimona, and assumed that David Ben-Gurion had requested that he not deal with that issue in the White House. Wiesner played a major role on disarmament issues for the Kennedy administration and had served as a board member of the Weizmann Institute of Science. He frequently ran into Ben-Gurion on visits to Israel, who would always ask him two questions: "Can computers think? And should we build a nuclear weapon?" Wiesner consistently answered "no" to the latter, which he believed marked him as a liberal in Ben-Gurion's eyes and limited his access.1
Project Troy, 1950 to 1951
Wiesner, an MIT electrical engineer, was among the participants in Project Troy, the study that MIT set up in October 1950, under contract with the United States Government, for the State Department on Soviet jamming of American broadcasts. The group met in Washington in October 1950 and in Cambridge until January 1951.2
Footnotes
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Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 8. ↩︎
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Bessner, "The Night Watchman," p. 237 (the Washington and Cambridge meetings) and p. 238 and note 41 (participant list, which gives Wiesner as "MIT, Electrical Engineer"). https://dukespace.lib.duke.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/232a76ac-f2d8-4827-99fe-50b3b109fa6c/content. ↩︎