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(320 million cubic meters) of water annually. By 1967, thanks to the effi cient channeling of wa-
ter resources, 140,000 acres (nearly 57 hectares) of wasteland in the Negev desert of southern
Israel had been reclaimed and were under cultivation.
The water supply also made possible the growth of the port of Eilat at the southern tip of the
Negev. Since the Straits of Tiran, at the mouth of the Gulf of Eilat, were now open as a result
of the 1956 war with Egypt, the once-sleepy fi shing town began to play a crucial role in pro-
moting Israel's growing trade with newly independent states of Africa and Asia. The Negev's
copper ore and potash resources were developed, several new towns were established in the
south —Netivot, Dimona, Arad, Yeruham, and Ashdod — and 250,000 new immigrants made
their homes in the region.
Despite Israel's internal progress, security needs and historical experience could never be
ignored. Generally, Israelis had tried to forget the Holocaust, but there were periodic remind-
ers. Paramount among these was Israeli intelligence's capture of the Nazi war criminal Adolf
Eichmann in his hiding place in Argentina on May 23, 1960. His trial and the chilling testimony
of survivors focused Israeli attention back on the murder of European Jews. Eichmann was
convicted and hanged on May 31, 1962, the only person ever executed by Israel.
The echoes of this affair reverberated in the Israeli determination that “never again” should
Jews be helpless in the face of their enemies' genocidal ambitions. In this spirit, Israel's Atomic
Energy Agency had been founded in 1952. In 1953 a process for extracting uranium from mate-
rials in the Negev desert was perfected, as was a new method for producing heavy water, used
in early nuclear reactors. In the late 1950s, Israel received help from France in designing and
constructing a nuclear reactor in Dimona, in southern Israel. The complex was initially de-
scribed as a textile plant, agricultural station, or metallurgical research facility. In 1960, Prime
Minister David Ben-Gurion announced that it was a nuclear research center built for “peaceful
purposes.”
In 1968 the CIA confi rmed long-standing U.S. suspicions that Israel had begun to produce
nuclear weapons. Israel has hewed to a policy of never openly admitting this, arguing, in the
words of Shimon Peres, that the “fog surrounding this question . . . strengthen[s] our deter-
rent.” Reportedly, they are not fully assembled, so Israel can argue that it has no actual nuclear
weapons. They could be quickly installed in missile warheads or artillery shells as a last-resort
threat to prevent Israel from military destruction, although this has never proven necessary.
In 1986, Mordehai Vanunu, a left-wing Israeli who worked in the nuclear installation and later
defected, claimed that Israel had between 100 and 200 small nuclear warheads, a fi gure higher
than CIA estimates.
FOREIGN POLICY IN THE 1950S AND 1960S
One of the main problems facing Israeli diplomacy, especially in the early years, has been how
to build close or even normal relations with any country when a signifi cant bloc of states, some
of them rich in oil and natural gas, promise to reward those countries that boycott or oppose
Israel and to punish those friendly toward it. Two statistics from 2010 show this potential dis-
parity in infl uence, a basic difference that has held throughout Israel's history:
