A brief history of the Israeli nuclear program, the open secret at the heart of the Iran war By Anna Illing
The current U.S.-Israeli war is the second war in less than a year declared by Israel and the USA, allegedly on the grounds of dismantling Iran’s nuclear capabilities.
While there is no documented evidence that Iran has a nuclear weapon or is close to developing one, there is another state in the Middle East whose nuclear arsenal exists as an open secret. That state is, of course, Israel, and its nuclear arsenal, although not officially recognized or confirmed, stands as one of the leading drivers of unrest throughout the region.
Israel’s history with nuclear weapons unfolded between secrecy, public tacit knowledge, and support, both materially and diplomatically, from the West, creating a playbook of strategic ambiguity around it still in place today.
At some point in the 1950s – it is impossible to pinpoint an exact date – David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, launched the country’s nuclear project.
In the Negev desert, 152 kilometers from Tel Aviv and 90 kilometers from Jerusalem, out of indiscreet sight, the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, commonly referred to simply as “Dimona” complex, was built. Seventy years later, the facility is considered the most important pillar of Israel’s nuclear program, while officially it is a 26-megawatt thermal reactor.
To Israel’s aid in this mission came France who, according to historians, was seeking an alliance against Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s then-president.
Except for the French partner, everyone was kept in the dark about Dimona, including the USA. In December 1960 Ben Gurion reported to the Israeli Knesset that the Dimona reactor was “a research reactor” which would serve “industry, agriculture, health and science”.
Washington did repeatedly question the nature of Israel’s actions in Dimona, and US officials even inspected the site on eight occasions between 1961 and 1969.
What they found was Israel’s articulated and well-designed propaganda stage: some sections of the nuclear plant were concealed, others were carefully disguised, hiding their real purpose.
But in the meantime, it is believed – impossible to claim certainty – that Israel finished building its underground separation plant by 1965, that it was producing weapons-grade plutonium by 1966 and assembling a nuclear weapon before the 1967 six-days war. It is also believed that in September 1979 Israel and apartheid era-South Africa conducted a joint nuclear test, known as the “Vela incident” from the US VELA 6911 satellite that detected a common sign of nuclear blast: an unexplained double flash of light.
Beliefs turned into facts in 1986. Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, had been an employee at Dimona for eight years when he disclosed to the Sunday Times details and photographs of the nuclear research center. From this evidence, it was discovered that Israel ranked as the world’s sixth nuclear power and possessed as many as 200 atomic warheads. For his act of whistle-blowing, Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned for 18 years, 11 of which he spent in solitary confinement. He was released in 2004, but he is still banned from travelling or speaking to foreign journalists.
There was, however, someone who was not caught by surprise: the U.S. and UK governments, and, of course, France. In 1969, the then U.S. president, Richard Nixon, and Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, reached a “nuclear understanding“: questions would not be asked if Israel maintained silence and vagueness around its capabilities and avoided testing its nuclear weapons. Explained in Henry Kissinger’s, then national security adviser, own words: “While we might ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession, what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.”
It took an extra twenty years for the rest of the world to know the extent of Israel’s nuclear programs, and another extra twenty, until 2006, for the documents exposing the agreement between Nixon and Meir to be declassified. Still, in 2009, when asked whether any countries in the Middle East possessed nuclear weapons, Barack Obama, who was serving his first term as president of the USA, said he would not speculate.
Similarly, in 2005, a BBC investigation revealed that Britain had secretly supplied 20 tons of heavy water to Israel almost half a century before. Heavy water is so called because it goes through a laborious electrolysis process, which results in the water containing extra neutrons. At the time of the sale, this type of water was fundamental to the nuclear reactor Israel was building with French help.
One of the world’s “worst-kept secrets”, as it has been called by some scholars, that for Israel results in the ability to maintain its military standing in the Middle East and simultaneously avoid scrutiny. On the other side, for the West, silence on the matter is harder to explain. Gary Samore, President Obama’s top advisor on nuclear nonproliferation from 2009 to 2013, presented one reason behind the secrecy: “For the Israelis to acknowledge and declare it, that would be seen as provocative. It could spur some of the Arab states and Iran to produce weapons. So we like calculated ambiguity.”
There has been an attempt by the UN General Assembly to call on Israel to allow international oversight of its nuclear facilities in December 2014. The resolution was adopted, 161 to 5, on the premise that Israel is the only Middle Eastern country and one of the three countries in the world that have never signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, together with India and Pakistan. Most importantly, of the world’s nine nuclear powers – U.S., Russia, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, and North Korea – Israel is the only one that does not officially admit having nuclear weapons. UN resolutions are non-binding, so it kept being business as usual for Israel.
To this day, there are estimates of Israel’s nuclear capacity: 90 warheads; 750–1110 kg plutonium stockpile, approximately – potentially enough for 187-277 nuclear weapons; 6 Dolphin-I and Dolphin II-class submarines believed capable of launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles; and Jericho III intermediate-range ballistic missiles with a potential range of 4,800 – 6,500 km.
Globally, these numbers would make Israel the second-smallest nuclear power after North Korea, but just as seventy years ago when Israel began building nuclear weapons, it remains impossible to know anything for a fact.
As events unfolded through the decades, the Israeli government maintained its stance of neither confirming nor denying its nuclear efforts, with some key rhetorical strategies that stayed the same. In the ’60s, Israel pledged “not to be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East”, an often-repeated line, also by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2011. Again in the ‘60 the expression “the Samson Option” was coined, a principle by which Israel would resort to nuclear retaliation in defence from an existential threat. In fact, although they never admitted the existence of a nuclear program, Israeli leaders have affirmed that nuclear weapons could be used if necessary.
That was the case of the 1973 war, when Egypt and Syria mounted a surprise attack. Anver Cohen, Israeli-American historian, professors and author, among others, of Israel and the Bomb, and other researchers have claimed that on that occasion Israel considered the nuclear option. More recently and less covertly, in 2016, Netanyahu claimed: “our submarine fleet acts as a deterrent to our enemies. They need to know that Israel can attack, with great might, anyone who tries to harm it”. And in November 2023, Haaretz reported that Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in a radio interview that dropping a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip was “an option”.
This long history and well-established narrative of secrecy and the avoidance of international inspection have succeeded to the extent that they remain in place today. Nonetheless, it is precisely because of Israel’s ambiguity that the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation reads on its website that “the lack of clarity surrounding an Israeli nuclear weapons program is a key obstacle to establishing a weapons of mass destruction free zone in the Middle East”.
One of the many, often contradicting, motivations given by Trump to justify its joint attack with Israel on Iran was the danger represented by Iran’s weapons of mass destruction, for the sake of the region’s and the world’s safety. In his first statement on the war on February 28 he warned: “Just imagine how emboldened this regime would be if they ever had, and actually were armed with nuclear weapons as a means to deliver their message”. No imagination is needed. We have seen through the 70 years of Israel’s nuclear program what this threat looks like. And if the goal is to secure a nuclear-free region, then it is long overdue that we start talking about Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
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