Harvey Schwartz - Never Again

Ben Shapiro’s flying was sloppy. Downright dangerous. Flying his high-performance sailplane was instinctive, a twenty-first-century remnant of seat-of-the-pants aviation. Sometimes he shut his eyes and imagined his arms spread wide, hands cupped, catching rising air currents under his wings.

The sailplane veered side to side as Shapiro floundered through rising air currents. He should have sensed the lift, banked his wings and circled like a hawk. Instead he bumped through the air, consumed by what he’d heard on the radio as he pulled into the Plymouth, Massachusetts, Soaring Society parking lot.

“An apparent atomic bomb has detonated in Tel Aviv, Israel’s second largest city.” The NPR news reader struggled to speak calmly. “No nation or organization has claimed responsibility…

“The mushroom cloud was visible in Jerusalem, thirty-five miles away.”

Never even been to Israel, Shapiro thought. Wonder if I ever will now.

What he heard next cut deeper.

“Egypt, Jordan and Syria offered to send emergency aid, accompanied by troops,” the radio reporter said. “There is no word on deaths, but the population of Tel Aviv is more than 400,000.”

News analysts speculated that the atom bomb that destroyed Tel Aviv might have been manufactured in Pakistan, North Korea or Iran. Maybe it was smuggled out of the former Soviet Union. It could even have been made in Israel itself and been the bomb the Jewish state secretly traded to South Africa before the Afrikaner government gave way to black majority rule.

American specialists estimated the device was in the twenty-five-kiloton range, almost twice the strength of the Hiroshima bomb. Satellite images showed a crater 370 feet across and nearly 90 feet deep. The detonation ignited a firestorm fueled by ruptured gas lines, gasoline tanks, every object that could burn within a half mile of ground zero.

The enormous fireball, with a surface temperature of 10,830 degrees Fahrenheit, created a glare bright enough to burn out the retinas of people ten miles away. Half a million people, most of them Jews but also tens of thousands of Palestinians, were estimated dead, or they would be within a couple of days. Cool Mediterranean breezes spread the radiation cloud inland and north through Israel’s best agricultural region, an area created from desert by generations of Jewish settlers during Israel’s brief life span. The bomb split the country in two—literally—creating the next chapter in Jewish history.

Perhaps in a hundred years Jews would memorialize the thousands who died fighting to their last bullet rather than give up their homeland. Or the million who were slaughtered by one uncontrollable army or another. Or the millions more herded into Palestinian concentration camps. If there were Israelis in a hundred years, however, they would be descendants of those who managed to flee to the port of Haifa, where every craft that could float was crammed with hysterical people old enough to remember the last Holocaust or young enough to fear the next. The eastern Mediterranean swarmed with ships with no destination except “away.”

Three days after the bomb, only the depths of the Negev Desert remained under Israeli control. A half dozen aging F-16 fighter-bombers provided support for a tank battalion training there. Colonel Gideon Hazama ordered a defensive ring formed around a concrete dome rising out of the desert at a spot known as Dimona, the location of Israel’s intentionally worst-kept secret.

Hazama, two air wing commanders, and the minister for cultural affairs, Debra Reuben, who had been on an inspection tour of southern Negev settlements, gathered in a conference room buried fifty feet below the sands.

Reuben looked like she would be staggered by the weight of a well-fed sparrow landing on her shoulder. After surviving fashionable high school anorexia on Long Island in New York, she’d grown into the type of woman who could see where on her hips a bowl of Ben & Jerry’s Cherry Garcia took up residence and would then spend the next week exercising it away. Her hair had been colored throughout so much of her life that she’d struggle to name her natural color on the first try. At present, it was a startling red.

Her appearance was deceptive.

Reuben’s obsession with Israel separated her from her girlfriends. From her early days attending Hebrew School at Temple Beth Shalom and through her teenage years as president of the Temple Youth Group, the story of young European Jews fleeing oppression to settle in the desert, learning to farm, learning to fight, creating their own government, triggered awe Reuben found difficult to explain. Compared with what she saw in her parents and their friends, with what she saw in herself and her friends, these Israeli Jews seemed larger, stronger, heroic. Mythical super-Jews.

I can do that, too , she’d thought. She was certain her future would be in Israel. Her parents smiled and nodded, confident she would outgrow it if only she’d meet the right boy.

They were wrong. Golda Meir, Israel’s first and only woman prime minister, a woman with features so prominent that she looked as if she’d already been carved in stone at twice life size, would have shaken her head in wonder to see tiny Debra Reuben holding the tattered reins of power over the State of Israel. Golda would have smiled, though, to see the stiff-backed soldiers biting any response to Reuben’s harangue.

Reuben’s rise to cabinet rank was viewed by most Israelis as a fluke, the kind of compromise that pleased nobody but was common in the hothouse of Israeli politics. She’d been a producer for the New York City CBS affiliate until a dozen years earlier, when she vacationed in Israel following a failed engagement to her on-again, off-again college heartthrob. She decided it was time to stop resisting what she’d expected would be her fate all along and stayed in Israel. Reuben found work in Israeli television, where she earned a reputation for integrity with her American brand of investigative reporting.

When a neutral but publicly respected person was needed to round out a coalition cabinet, her name was proposed as somebody few people would object to. To nearly everyone’s surprise, she took her new position seriously, worked hard and earned a grudging respect.

She knew nothing about military strategy and in fact would have been hard pressed to load a simple Uzi pistol. But now the fate of Israel’s nuclear weapons cache rested with her.

That Israel had nuclear weapons was an open secret assumed by the intelligence services of all the major powers and feared by her neighbors and enemies. Israel’s real secret was not that it had nuclear weapons but rather that it had so few. Rather than bankrupt the nation assembling an atomic arsenal, Israel hinted at about a hundred bombs—but stopped at three. Pretend bombs were as great a deterrent as real ones.

Now Reuben played the role of the hard-nosed militant while Hazama and one of the two Israeli Air Force pilots argued against following orders from a nonexistent central government.

“Do I have to repeat the decision made by our government years ago?” Reuben asked the exhausted military officer. “If the end of Israel is inevitable, rule number one is that these weapons must not fall into enemy hands. If all else is lost, they are to be detonated in place. The loss of the Negev is a small price to prevent the future blackmail of whatever Jewish state eventually reestablishes itself.