Sadat in Israel

Just 30 years ago, I had a letter from an English editor asking me to become his paper's chief correspondent in the United States. There was only one snag in the way of my taking over – I'd lived in New York for ten years, I'd planted roots there and the move to Washington would involve some uprooting. To my immense relief, he didn't so much concede that I should stay in New York, he insisted on it. 'We don't want to know,' he wrote, 'so much what's going on in Washington, as what's going on in America.'

Well, if you'd been in Washington two weeks ago, you'd have been wondering why President Carter decided, at a fortnight's notice, to postpone his tour of nine countries and inquisitive reporters went through the list carefully to see which of the nine was brewing trouble that it would have been uncomfortable for Mr Carter to be present at. The countries, by the way, were Venezuela, Brazil, Nigeria, India, Iran, France, Belgium, Poland and Saudi Arabia. 

The one sore thumb in this large landscape is Brazil and, for a year or more, Washington has had a running argument with Bonn and Brasilia over Brazil's determination to acquire an advanced nuclear technology from West Germany. Next to America's enormous consumption of energy and the need to conserve it, I'm pretty sure that nothing is more steadily on Mr Carter's mind than the danger of seeing more and more nations possess the means to make nuclear weapons. 

Now Brazil wants – and the Germans are ready to provide – a nuclear reprocessing plant for the declared purpose of re-enriching spent uranium. Any nation might want that as a new source of energy but there is a nagging and frightening possibility inherent in any nuclear reprocessing plant. It can, also, produce plutonium and in spite of every solemn assurance that the plant will only be used for re-enriching uranium, the fact remains that to make an atomic bomb, all you need is a lump of plutonium about the size of a cricket ball and that any large atomic power reactor, such as those in the United States and France, produces a cricket ball of plutonium once every three days. Of course, you then need the know-how, but there are several thousand scientists in the world who have that know-how. A 19-year-old student at Princeton figured it out for himself from a college textbook a couple of years ago. 

And a book that's been a smashing bestseller in the United States called 'The Crash of '79' imagines the collapse of the world's economies on the supposition that a ruler of a Middle Eastern kingdom – a colourful fellow but no great shakes as a world figure – becomes enormously rich after the oil embargo and, in a fit of megalomania, decides to become a superpower. He acquires two atomic power reactors, paying the paltry sum to a man taking in $30 billion a year, of $2 billion each. 

By the end of 1978, he has enough plutonium for 40 bombs – enough to destroy New York and Moscow, all the small cities of the Middle East, any two bombs being able to demolish any fleet headed for the Persian Gulf. In the end, the grandiose ruler doesn't drop all 40, only six and in the Middle East, but for some reason none of the nuclear experts could explain, the madman had used cobalt as the contamination agent in his bombs. Now cobalt is deadly and it stays active for at least a quarter of a century. Therefore, for at least so long, the oilfields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iran would remain totally inaccessible. 

This fascinating and frighteningly plausible novel ends with these brisk sentences: 'The Arabs were through as a world power and as a threat to Israel. Of course the Western industrial powers were through too. The mad ruler was vaporised in his command bunker and the world was now forced to live with a banking system that lay in ruins. With monetary chaos and with the prospect of having to survive on half its former oil reserves. The lights everywhere gradually began to flicker and fade. The crash of '79 was complete.' 

Well, one bit of expertise that President Carter possesses, which no other President of the United States has ever known much about, is nuclear physics and it ought to be a consolation to people who grow increasingly dubious about Mr Carter's presidential capacities. There is, I hope you understand, no suggestion that Brazil has any sinister intentions in wanting that reprocessing plant. Still, it would be the first outside the United States in this hemisphere and, in the hands of the wrong ruler, it could be as much of a threat to this country as the Cuban missile launching pads ever were. 

So, when Secretary of State Vance took off for Brazil instead of President Carter, you could have guessed that for a little time Brazil would be the big Washington topic. Mr Vance has been there and back, by the way, and I doubt that most of you have heard a word about him because his mission coincided with what you might call a happenstance that took everybody's mind off Mr Carter's postponed world tour and his concern over an energy bill, and swivelled the eyes of the world on to one place – Jerusalem. 

It all came about through the combination of an accident and a hunch in the mind of one newsman, the sort of thing that we used to chuckle over in those 1930s movies like 'The Front Page' or 'Foreign Correspondent', in which Joel McCrea in a raincoat practically prevented a European war. 

The sequence of events is almost too melodramatic to be believed. Start with the prickly atmosphere in the Middle East that we've all learnt to live with. One day the Israeli Prime Minister, Mr Begin, makes a speech warning the Egyptians they will never destroy Israel. Washington had been fearing that the Israelis, at the peak of their strength, might start something any day. Mr Begin didn't help these fears by telling the Lebanese, through the American ambassador, that Israel was prepared to exercise hot pursuit if there were any more Palestinian attacks. And to this provocation, the Egyptian President, Mr Sadat, told some visiting American congressmen that he was ready to sit down with Mr Begin and all his parliamentary deputies at any time. Next day Mr Begin told some Frenchmen that he'd like to invite Mr Sadat to Israel. 

These exchanges, so far, produced no great hopes. On the Monday morning, the Israeli military were complaining that the Egyptians had violated their Kissinger agreement to keep no more than 9,000 men in the Sinai, that they now had somewhere between 15 and 20,000. 

Well, that same morning, several million Americans were shaving or gulping coffee, watching the Columbia Broadcasting System's morning news show. Walter Cronkite, the unflappable grand-daddy of all television anchormen, interviewed Mr Sadat by satellite. Mr Sadat said he was willing to go to Israel and address its parliament but he'd had no invitation. Walter Cronkite – who looks like everybody's benevolent uncle and in a national poll in the bad Nixon days was voted the man most trusted by the American people – Cronkite had a hunch or, as he later called it 'an unprecedented event in my career' which, by the way, covers 35 years of newspaper and, mostly, television news reporting. He telephoned the CBS man in Tel Aviv and asked him to invite Mr Begin to appear on a live interview. It took only six hours for Mr Begin to ponder, consult, agree and appear on American television and promise to send, through the American embassy in Israel, a formal invitation to President Sadat. 

Of course it's too simple to say that Cronkite interviewed Sadat, heard him complain he'd not had an invitation and Cronkite said, 'We'll see you get one!' and he got it. But if all this had been brewing through President Sadat's talks in Damascus, through earlier visits by Secretary Vance and Mr Begin to Romania, through telephone calls between Cairo and Washington, and Mr Begin and President Carter, an old Middle East hand could have been forgiven for watching all these comings and goings and hear these threats and promises and consider that, in the Middle East, the situation was normal, all fouled up. But once Mr Sadat told millions of Americans that Mr Begin had never asked him, Mr Begin became the victim of the tube. As Cronkite put it, 'I don't consider it a notable scoop. It was a technological thing.' 

Well, it's much too early even to make a reasonable guess at what will come out of the dramatic, almost biblical, scene in the Israeli parliament. After all the passionate rhetoric and the venerable quotations, Washington, at any rate, is now trying to discover which lambs are willing to lie down with the lion. 

And the general mood has been depressed since in the aftermath of President Sadat's speech, Moshe Dayan made a television appearance and said that Israel should 're-evaluate but not revise its stand on the two conditions which Mr Sadat laid down: the Israeli withdrawal to her 1967 borders and a Palestine homeland'. It's difficult to know how you re-evaluate, but don't revise, your determination to stay in the Sinai, the Golan and the Jordan Valley. 'And,' said Mr Dayan, 'as long as we're there, Mr Sadat's "No more war" does not exist.' 

It is not the happiest note to end on but it was Mr Dayan's and it was the one that caught the American headlines and dimmed the glow of last Sunday's brave show. At least it will keep our mind off Brazil and reactors and hunks of plutonium the size of cricket balls.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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