What you say might have some basis in reality but I have to say it sounds like bullshit to me. Java could easily have provided for manual memory management without using direct pointers to memory in order to do so. Hypothetical allocation / deallocation methods could simply operate on references that may only have either a legal value or null (when deallocated or going out of scope on stack allocation).

If you bothered to do the slightest bit of research, Gosling himself says many times that it's for programmer convenience and to increase the robustness of applications. Pointer bugs are the bane of C and C++ programmers (yes, I've programmed in both for about 15 years and had my share of them as well). Gosling was shooting for something like C++ with all the hard bits removed.

Can you provide a reference for your claim that it has nothing to do with programmer convenience and is only about the Java security model?