The Glory Boys by Gerald Seymour Read Free Book Online

requirement for nuclear energy for peace-ful uses, ranging from electricity power to the extended life of vegetables on shop counters. Sokarev was pleased.
    Fewer of his friends regarded him with such curiosity. Life became more normal.

    In the halcyon days after the June victory of 1967, when the nation's defences seemed secure and the Arabs had taken a bloodied, broken nose, been pushed back far from the Israeli settlements, across the great buffer zones of Sinai, the Jordan valley, and the Golan Heights, then there was little to concern Sokarev about the pace of his work.
    He was at forty-one a young man for his job, on the up, regarded by his colleagues as brilliant and directing his energies toward what his project director blithely called the 'agro-nuclear complexes': the reclaiming of desert land through the use of thousands of millions of gallons of sea water, distilled through nuclear power. The project did not last.
    The war of attrition across the Suez water-way exacted a toll both from human life and from the fragile Israeli economy. New tensions rose along the Egyptian and Syrian borders. And on the day in October 1973 when Sokarev and his family were at prayer, Yom Kippur Day, the Arab armies breached the great defensive lines that lay along the Canal and which bestrode the Golan. The peace was hard-won this time; none of the trumpeting of 1967 followed the cease-fire. Reports filtered through the foreign press of new, far-reaching Soviet rockets, sited on the plains behind Damascus and protected by nests of anti-aircraft missiles, rockets that could reach any Israeli town, either with a conventional high-explosive warhead or armed with a localized nuclear device. To Sokarev and to many of his team it was clear the time had come to consider intensely, if perhaps belatedly, what was called in the common rooms round the world where men specialized in physics, the
    'nuclear option'.
    The days at Dimona started earlier, ended later. Sokarev and the team that was built around him wrestled with the problems of abbreviations in time and expenditure for the fashioning of the bomb. Extraction of uranium from the phosphate ores of the Negev was increased, as the plant gulped up more than twenty-five tons a year. Some of the ablest men in the department were sent to the United States, and then to West Germany to study at the European nuclear centre. As a result the costly Jericho missile system was developed with a range of more than three hundred miles, the country's own and independent delivery weapon.
    The politicians began to talk. 'The possibility of nuclear weapons moving into the Middle East theatre should not be eliminated,' said Moshe Dayan. Israel's President proudly announced that his country had assembled the knowledge and equipment to construct the bomb.
    And from the reactor in the desert came the tiny quantities of plutonium 239, at little more than eight kilograms a year, in bulk the size of a fruit from the Beersheba orangeries, yet with the capability to create a twenty kiloton explosion. The bombs, equivalent in destructive capacity to those dropped more than thirty years earlier on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, could not be tested, but at least the stockpile was starting.
    It had been a brutal twenty months for Sokarev, of fierce hours, interminable arguments over government money, that never extended to the budgetry minimum he maintained his department must have if research were to continue. He took his papers home at night, but increasingly they were covered with the columns of figures that represented the finances of the programme and were expressed in the currency of the inflated Israeli lira. He longed for the days when his working brain had been overwhelmed only by the horizontal characters of the equations he sought to set up and then disprove, and, if he could not find the flaw, then rejoice in the knowledge of perfection.
    That he was tired showed. His face was greyer and had the pallid yellowness