Winds of Change

Just before dawn, a weapons carrier bounced over scrub-spotted sand dunes to a secret site near the Mediterranean. Out stepped Israel's Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Foreign Minister Golda Meir. Near the water's edge, a slim rocket loomed 40 ft. up into the night sky.

"What are the chances it will succeed?" asked Ben-Gurion. "Fifty-fifty," was the reply. At 4:41 a.m. came the command "Esh!" (Fire!), and the rocket lifted off.

"It's going up!" shouted the Prime Minister. The solid-fueled, multiple-stage rocket (the number of stages was a military secret) tilted slightly and soared up 50 miles. There it emitted a cloud of sodium vapor--a standard means of enabling observers to track ionospheric wind currents.

Israel's first rocket was labeled the second--Shavit Shtayim, or Comet II. Deputy Defense Minister Shimon Peres explained that this prevented the rocket from becoming known as Shavit Aleph. First letter of the Hebrew alphabet, Aleph is a symbol of the government Mapai Party. "We would be accused of making propaganda for the Mapai," explained Peres. Israel boasted that the rocket was "planned, constructed and fired by Israeli scientists and technicians," claimed that most of the raw materials were local. "

Other nations--notably the U.S., Russia, France, Britain, Italy, Japan, Canada and Australia--have fired weather rockets. But Shavit was the first fired by any Middle Eastern country, and a tremor of alarm ran through Israel's Arab neighbors (the Arabs suffered a similar tremor seven months ago when Israel admitted it was constructing a 24,000-kw. nuclear reactor). Presumably, any nation that can send a rocket winging 50 miles up for wind data can readjust its flight for military purposes. Jordan's Prime Minister Bahjat Talhouni said his government was "extremely concerned."

Israel itself was of two minds about Shavit. Ben-Gurion insisted that the rocket was for science. But Peres said that Israel had given rockets a high priority because of "grave defense problems." He added pointedly: "If other countries would change their belligerent policies, we would change our priorities."

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