Key points
- Israel built nuclear weapons during the 1960s
- It reportedly deceived the US about its activities
- Israel neither denies nor accepts it’s a nuclear power
ISLAMABAD: Israel, the only Middle Eastern country to have nuclear weapons has neither accepted nor denied the fact that it has nuclear weapons.
The origin of this strategy of neither accepting nor denying seems to have arisen from clandestine ways through which the only Jewish state in the world achieved the millstone without making even the closest of its allies sceptical of its ambitions.
During the 1960s, Israel built the bomb in near-absolute secrecy. It reportedly deceived the US government about its activities and goals.
But now, US official documents shed light on almost how possibly the Israelis pulled the show.
There are still many open questions about this history such as how a nascent nation duped professional and well-trained US scientists for years? When exactly and how did the US learn the truth? And finally, were all US government bodies and officials fooled by the deception or did some sense the truth and not acknowledge it?
The chief architect
According to a story published in the Foreign Policy magazine, Israel’s first leader, David Ben-Gurion, initiated Israel’s nuclear project in the mid- to late- 1950s, establishing Israel’s nuclear complex at Dimona. At that point in history, only three countries had nuclear weapons.
Against apparent US opposition, Israel secretly assembled its first nuclear devices on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War.
The documents reveal how Israeli leaders were determined to reach their goals. They saw the nuclear project as a commitment to ensure the country’s future—a “never again” pledge shaped by the memory of the Holocaust. Audacity, trickery, and deception were key aspects of the relentless execution of Israel’s nuclear journey.
Deception and camouflage
The George Washington University’s National Security Archive posted a new Electronic Briefing Book last month that includes 20 documents on Israel’s nuclear project.
Those reports shed light on what the US government knew about Dimona’s secrets and how Israel concealed them.
From the start, Israeli leaders conceived of the Dimona project as a secret within a secret, as per Foreign Policy. The first secret was the 1957 French-Israeli nuclear agreement that led to the creation of the nuclear complex. The two countries negotiated the agreement confidentially because both sides were aware of its sensitivity.
And then there was a deeper secret: the large six-story underground reprocessing facility, often referred to as a chemical separation plant, that would provide the capability to produce weapons-grade plutonium and remain concealed. Very few people on both sides of the French-Israeli agreement knew that inner secret.
Until now, the evidence suggested that when the United States discovered the Dimona project in the final months of 1960, it did not know this deeper secret.
Subsequent visits by US experts could not exactly establish the fact that Israel war well into its project.
To make this narrative credible, Israel committed itself to a full deception campaign. That required not only the concealment of the underground separation plant but also the camouflaging of other components at the Dimona site to provide a credible but false picture of the reactor and its use.
A State Department Intelligence and Research (INR) report from March 9, 1967, provided explosive information. The document remains heavily redacted, but the memo by INR chief Thomas Hughes disclosed that Tel Aviv sources had reported that Israel either had or was about to complete a separation plant, the plant was located at Dimona, and that the Dimona reactor had been operating at full capacity for weapons production purposes, according the Foreign Policy magazine.
Assemble and detonate
As the 1967 Middle East crisis reached its climax, Israel devised a contingency plan to detonate a nuclear device as a demonstration of a new capability in the event of the “most extreme scenario,” where Israel’s existence might be in grave danger.
To conduct the plan, Israel secretly assembled two or three nuclear implosion devices for the first time. The assembly site was elsewhere in Israel, but the team used plutonium cores produced at Dimona.
No outsiders knew or suspected it at the time, and it became known only in 2017, 50 years after the Six-Day War, when a key player’s testimony was published.
