Israel’s ground-to-ground ballistic missile project, along with the Dimona nuclear reactor, is considered one of Israel’s best-kept secrets.
Officially, Israel has never admitted the fact of the development of long-range ground-to-ground missiles (including those having an intercontinental range of 5-5.5 thousand kilometers, i.e. intercontinental ballistic missiles) and has never indicated any willingness to use them. However, in recent years there has been a lot of information, mainly in the United States and France, regarding Israel’s development of this type of missile.
New information from American sources
Recently, the Richard Nixon Presidential Library (an archive of documents, records, collections and other historical materials belonging to the American president) has presented documents containing new information about Israeli tests of “Jericho” missiles.
The documents belongs to the Defense Intelligence Agency (Defense Intelligence Agency), under which many U.S. intelligence agencies and special services operate.
The DIA has declassified the documents, which were published in July this year in a book called “Rahav” by the Israeli military historian Yoav Gelber.
According to these documents, about three years after the end of the Six Day War, Israel carried out two tests on the “Jericho” rocket.
This was after France imposed an arms embargo on the Jewish state. Nevertheless, our state was able to obtain an enormous amount of information from the French company Marcel-Dassault, which was developing these rockets for the Israeli government, as well as engineering drawings, plans of the rockets and apparently also some parts used to assemble them and even the finished rockets that were prepared for the first tests.
The documents, approved for publication by the US censor, include testimony from American military attachés serving under the US embassy in Israel at the time, who witnessed the missile launches, during the tests that took place in Israel back then.
In the first experiment, which was conducted on September 25, 1970, the military attachés saw a missile trail rising south of Tel Aviv in a northwest direction, toward the Mediterranean Sea. The attachés noted in their observations that they saw clearly two stages of the rocket in the trail (the “Jericho-1” rocket was actually a two-stage rocket).
During the flight, the first stage engine finished its work at an altitude of about 15-20 thousand feet (4.5-6 km), after which the first part of the rocket separated from it (and fell into the sea). Then the second stage engine started working, the ignition of which was seen by American attachés. At an altitude of about 25-30 thousand feet (7.5-9 km) it stopped, and then the second part of the rocket also separated (and also fell into the sea).
According to the DIA estimations in the document, if the attaches actually observed the missile test, it was most likely a “Jericho MD-620” missile (made by Marcel Dassault, also known as “Jericho-1”).
In the second experiment, which took place about ten days after the first, the missile was again launched from an area south of Tel Aviv toward the Mediterranean Sea. American intelligence considers that the launch in that direction was due to Israel’s desire to escape Russian radar systems that were then deployed in Egypt, as well as to avoid the risk of launch casualties in case of a missile technical malfunction (a launch in all other directions besides the sea could have resulted in the missile dropping in the populated territory, including the possibility that pieces of the missile could fall and get into the hands of enemy states).
Another interesting detail is that according to the evidence of the American attachés given in the document, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan were present during the experiment. This fact obviously indicates the great importance of the experiment and demonstrates that it was a strategic weapon test.
Information about the “Jericho” missile — from the company that developed it
A lot of information about the “Jericho” missile became public after the French company Marcel Dassault, which developed it for Israel in 1962-69, uploaded information about the missile to the company’s website and published a book about its activities over the years, which detailed the development process of the “Jericho” missile and included documents and photos.
According to the information published by the company, in 1962 the French government asked the company to develop a ground-to-ground missile for Israel, and therefore it developed the “Jericho 620-MD” missile with a range of over 500 km.
The first test of one-stage missile, was conducted about three years later (in 1965), and testing of a two-stage missile was already launched the following year. The “Jericho” missile was the first French ballistic missile with an onboard digital computer, according to the publications of the Marcel Dassault Company, by the way, founded by a French Jew, aviation engineer, industrialist and politician Marcel Bloch. About a year and a half after the Six Day War, the project was canceled due to a total embargo placed by the French government on arms sales to Israel, enforced by President de Gaulle for political reasons after the Six Day War.
According to the company, even though the project was stopped, it provided France with development teams specializing in aerodynamic and thermodynamic phenomena (i.e. related to the strong heating of the missile) occurring in missiles reaching the speed of 6 Mach (about 2 km per second), as well as experts in inertial guidance systems and other specialists.
Moving on with the project
All of the details mentioned above, which have been made public recently, give us a glimpse into the very early years of this Israeli strategic project. Later, after the French imposed an arms embargo on Israel, according to foreign publications, the Mossad managed to transfer information about the project, drawings and plans, as well as several missiles already completed for the various stages of the experiment. Perhaps this was possible because the founder of the company, as has already been said, was a Jew.
According to foreign publications, as well as analysis of data from the Israeli “Shavit” rocket for launching spacecraft and satellites, the range of the “Jericho” rocket types that Israel possesses today has significantly increased, reaching 5,000 km.