Final_Judgment

502 Quid Pro Quo? [405]
development, we can certainly understand why Israel would indeed
consider JFK to be a danger to Israel's very survival.
A frustrated McCone resigned as CIA director in the Johnson
administration in 1965, explaining to a colleague, "When I cannot get the
President to read my reports, then it's time to go." 1002 According to Seymour
Hersh, McCone "also understood what Israel's continuing refusal to permit
full-fledged international inspections of its nuclear program] meant." 1003
That is, that everything that he (McCone) and John F. Kennedy had
done to prevent Israel from building the nuclear bomb had failed and that
Israel was moving right along in its determined program to do so.
What's more, McCone also obviously had good reason to be disturbed
about China's nuclear success, in spite of his previous determined efforts
(endorsed by JFK and rejected by LBJ) to block China from securing
nuclear weapons capability.
CHINA'S NUCLEAR DEBUT—ALSO ISRAEL'S?
It is at this juncture that we will now turn to "the Israeli connection" to
Red China and we will discover that there is much more to the picture than
we might at first realize. In fact, a good argument can be made that it was
Israel—working behind the scenes—that enabled China (already in the
process of developing its bomb) to launch its first successful nuclear test.
Ultimately, if the truth ever comes out, we will probably discover that
China's first nuclear blast was, in reality, a joint Israeli-Red Chinese
accomplishment. For the moment, of course, that's pure speculation. But
facts in the record do point us toward this conclusion.
Seymour Hersh himself points out that China's first nuclear test caught
the West by surprise. He writes: "The American nuclear community already
had been rocked in October 1964 upon learning that China's first nuclear
bomb had been triggered by uranium, and not plutonium, as the CIA and
other intelligence agencies had widely anticipated." 1004
What Hersh adds further is especially interesting: "There was
immediate suspicion that China had somehow bought on the black
market—or stolen—the enriched uranium for its bomb (the CIA would not
learn for another year or so that China had completed a huge diffusion plant
much earlier than expected)." 1005
In short, Red China had moved much further along in its nuclear
expansion project than had ever been suspected. China was getting some
help somewhere. This, of course, was at the same time that Israel was
moving steadily along in its own nuclear development program.
In the meantime—and in the decades which followed—a strange little
spy story involving an American nuclear company was evolving. In his
book, The Samson Option, Hersh examined the Byzantine tale of the
Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), based in Apollo,
Pennsylvania (near Pittsburgh).