April 26: Israel’s Nuclear Pioneer

Yuval Ne’eman, who founded Israel’s space program in 1983 and was a critical player in the country’s acquisition of nuclear weapons, died at 80 on this date in 2006. Born in Tel Aviv in 1925, Ne’eman joined the Haganah at age 15 and ultimately rose to help organize the IDF into a reservist-based army for which he developed a mobilization system and wrote the first draft of the defense doctrine. Ne’eman was deputy head of Israeli military intelligence and created a database for all intelligence information. He also invented the spying bugs that yielded data that helped destroy Egypt’s air force on the ground in the 1967 Six Day War. Ne’eman’s scientific accomplishments included discovery of the quark (independently of Murray Gell-Man and George Zweig), and his honors included the Israel Prize (1969) and the Albert Einstein Award (1970). He was also a pioneer of extremist politics in Israel: In 1979, he founded Tehiya, a breakaway from Likud, to protest the Camp David peace talks, and he was a stubborn advocate of maximum territorial expansion. “Most Israelis,” wrote Lawrence Jaffe in a Guardian obituary, “deemed his views lunatic and often repulsive.”

“The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since the advent of special relativity, is still much smaller than the number of people who believe in horoscopes.” —Yuval Ne’eman