Nuclear Hero's 'Crime' Was Making Us Safer
Mordechai Vanunu is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He consciously risked all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of the true extent of the nuclear danger facing us. And he paid the full price, a burden in many ways worse than death, for his heroic act -- for doing exactly what he should have done and what others should be doing.
Vanunu's "crime" was committed in 1986, when he gave the London Sunday Times a series of photos he had taken within the Israeli nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician.
For that act -- revealing that his country's program and stockpile were much larger than the CIA or others had estimated -- Vanunu was kidnapped from the Rome airport by agents of the Israeli Mossad and secretly transported back for a closed trial in which he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.
He spent the first 11 1/2 years in solitary confinement in a 6-by-9-foot cell, an unprecedented term of solitary under conditions that Amnesty International called "cruel, inhuman and degrading."
Now, after serving his full term, he is due to be released today. But his "unfreedom" is to be continued by restrictions on his movements and his contacts: He cannot leave Israel, he will be confined to a single town, he cannot communicate with foreigners face to face or by phone, fax or e-mail (purely punitive conditions because any classified information that he may have possessed is by now nearly two decades old).
The irony of all this is that no country in the world has a stronger stake than Israel in preventing nuclear proliferation, above all in the Middle East. Yet Israel's secret nuclear policies -- to this day it does not acknowledge that it possesses such weapons -- are shortsighted and self-destructive. They promote rather than block proliferation by encouraging the country's neighbors to develop their own, comparable weapons.
This will not change without public mobilization and democratic pressure, which in turn demand public awareness and discussion. It was precisely this that Vanunu sought to stimulate.
Not in Israel or in any other case -- not that of the U.S., Russia, England, France, China, India or Pakistan -- has the decision to become a nuclear weapons state ever been made democratically or even with the knowledge of the full Cabinet. It is likely that in an open discussion not one of these states could convince its own people or the rest of the world that it had a legitimate reason for possessing as many warheads as the several hundred that Israel allegedly has (far beyond any plausible requirement for deterrence).
