A new reality after 60 years of denial about the Israeli nuclear weapons program

In early 1960, while a group of American diplomats were flying aboard an Israeli helicopter, one of them spotted a construction site sticking out in the middle of the Negev Desert, about 20 miles west of the Dead Sea. The American official pointed with his hand and asked his Israeli companion, Adi Cohen - who was working in the Ministry of Finance - about the nature of this site. Cohen answered the Americans - who included the American ambassador to Israel, Ogden Reed - that it was a “textile factory.”

But what that official saw was nothing more than the construction work of the nuclear reactor in Dimona, which is known today as the cradle of the only nuclear arsenal in the Middle East. Months later, Ambassador Reed requested a meeting with Cohen, after US intelligence was able to uncover the true nature of that site.

A secret US diplomatic cable - part of a collection of declassified documents compiled by the National Security Archive that includes details of that helicopter flight - said: “Cohen initially treated the matter with some cynicism, but from his speech it appeared that he realized that the reactor might eventually be used for military purposes.” Five years later, US nuclear officials discovered hundreds of pounds of enriched uranium suitable for making nuclear weapons missing from a facility in Pennsylvania; This led some US intelligence officials - in addition to what was indicated in a recent documentary - to believe that this amount had been diverted to support the Israeli nuclear program.

Over the next 60 years, the United States and Israel took an evasive approach, with neither acknowledging Israel's development of a nuclear arsenal. When Israeli officials want to insinuate that their country possesses nuclear weapons, they use the phrase “textile factory” - which came as an impromptu response from Eddie Cohen to American diplomats - as a common euphemism.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to the “textile factory” incident during a meeting with the head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Authority, in a speech he delivered on July 14. Over time, it became what Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen described as “the most open secret in the world.”

Both the United States and Israel currently follow a policy based on ambiguity. They hint at the existence of Israeli nuclear weapons without officially confirming this. This policy helped the United States maintain a public position opposing other countries' pursuit of nuclear weapons, and also enabled Israel to avoid questions about how it obtained the bomb (or whether it did).

But this stagnation may be changing, as other countries in the region advance their nuclear programs. The United States and Israel are waging a war against Iran, partly aimed at preventing Tehran from possessing a nuclear weapon. While leading experts in the field of nuclear non-proliferation believe that these efforts may be futile.

At the same time, the nuclear cooperation agreement between the United States and Saudi Arabia is still under consideration before Congress. It appears that the firm support - which was once considered unshakable - for Israel's military ambitions has begun to erode within the United States, as President Donald Trump said on Tuesday that the United States may stop military aid to Israel worth nearly $4 billion by the end of the year, justifying this by saying that it "no longer needs it."

A group of Democratic lawmakers and advocacy groups have been saying in recent years that it is time for the United States to stop pretending not to know the truth about Israel's nuclear arsenal. In an interview with Ofoq News Network, Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro argued that the policy of ambiguity followed by the United States towards the Israeli arsenal has become an outdated approach, and has even become "reckless and dangerous."

Castro - a member of the House Foreign Affairs and Intelligence Committees - pointed out that the United States going to war alongside Israel, without knowing its “red lines” for the use of nuclear weapons, and without identifying the “contingency plans” available in the event that those weapons are deployed or nuclear facilities are subjected to strikes, entails great risks. If this façade of “knowledge denial” falls, it will force a radical review of the origins of Israeli nuclear technology, and of decades of “cat and mouse” games aimed at preventing conclusive evidence of the existence of a nuclear weapons program.

American inspectors never found the secret underground facility at Dimona, which was used to produce bomb-grade plutonium; Israeli officials were deliberately closing the elevator leading to it before the inspectors arrived, according to what was reported in a Hebrew-language television documentary released in 2024 entitled “The Atom and Me.” The documentary included interviews - published after his death - with a former head of an Israeli intelligence agency who was charged with supporting the nuclear weapons program. Promoting transparency could further undermine the credibility of the United States, at a time when it continues to oppose other countries joining the “nuclear club.”

This could also lead to economic sanctions or a ban on arms sales, aimed at punishing countries seeking to acquire the bomb. A US State Department spokesperson said: “It is our established policy that the Department does not comment publicly on reports related to specific military platforms or situations.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment, while the Israeli embassy in Washington referred Ofoq News's inquiry to the Prime Minister's Office, which in turn did not provide any response. Matthew Kroenig, an expert in nuclear strategies and professor of political science at Georgetown University, believes that “Israel’s announcement - if it happens - of being a nuclear power may increase pressure on other countries in the region to follow suit,” adding that “the outbreak of a runaway nuclear arms race in the Middle East does not serve American policy.”

At a public hearing before Congress in June, Castro raised the issue with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio - who is the second American, after Henry Kissinger, to serve as both chief diplomat and national security adviser - offered what is arguably the most frank public assessment by an American diplomat on the issue.

“I think most countries in the world appreciate that they have nuclear capabilities, but they have never publicly acknowledged it,” Rubio said. “And for our part, as part of our foreign policy, for a variety of reasons, we don’t discuss it that way either.”

Building Denial Experts explained to Ufoq News that this policy of secrecy arose as a result of the necessities of the Cold War; Both the United States and Israel feared that the revelation that Israel possessed nuclear weapons would prompt Arab countries - with the support of the Soviet Union - to launch their own nuclear programs. Israel also feared the diplomatic repercussions that might result from being officially declared a state possessing nuclear weapons.

In the same year in which quantities of uranium were discovered missing from the facility located in Pennsylvania, Henry Kissinger visited Tel Aviv, where he briefed senior officials in the American mission to the American embassy on the content of his talks with the Israeli side. Kissinger - who was then a professor in the Department of Political Science at Harvard University - was working as a foreign policy advisor to a number of prominent figures in the Republican Party, before assuming the position of National Security Advisor in the Nixon administration less than four years later, specifically in 1969.

According to a declassified document in the National Security Archive summarizing those conversations, Kissinger had a “firm conviction that Israel had already embarked on a program to develop nuclear weapons,” something President John F. Kennedy had striven to prevent. Kissinger met with then-Israeli Deputy Defense Minister, Shimon Peres, and found that Peres and other senior Israeli officials supported the idea of ​​building nuclear weapons.

The document notes that “there was no doubt, even among scientists, about Israel’s need to develop these weapons.” However, there is a striking aspect to the matter: Kissinger stated that Israeli officials considered it important “not to appear to have introduced (nuclear) weapons into the region.”

According to Avner Cohen, a prominent historian specializing in the Israeli nuclear program, American and Israeli officials sought to “blur” the boundaries around what is meant by the word “introduction” (weapons into the region), and the two sides did not agree on a specific definition of what constitutes a “nuclear weapon.” From the Israeli point of view - as Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin explained to American officials in a conversation that took place in November 1968, during negotiations over the sale of advanced F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft - a weapon is not considered an “entry” unless it undergoes testing and is officially announced.

American officials were deeply concerned that public disclosure of an Israeli nuclear arsenal would prompt Arab states, many of which were still bitter from defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War, to seriously seek nuclear weapons or security guarantees from the Soviet Union. In a report attached to a memorandum submitted by Henry Kissinger to President Richard Nixon in July 1969, senior US officials concluded that Israel's possession of nuclear weapons would "significantly increase the likelihood that nuclear weapons would be used in the context of an actual conflict."

But Kissinger realized that the United States likely would not be able to stop Israel, even if Nixon threatened an arms embargo. Preventing weapons shipments while keeping the nuclear program secret would likely have angered Congress and caused a domestic political crisis.

Also, revealing the Israeli nuclear program with the aim of exerting diplomatic pressure could have opened the door to accusations from the Soviet Union and Arab countries of American complicity. Therefore, the solution was to adopt a policy based on “ambiguity” regarding this situation.

It is noteworthy that Israel also refused to sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In the same memo, Kissinger wrote: “Perhaps the minimum we really want is for Israel’s possession of these weapons not to become an accepted international fact.”

Kissinger's July 1969 memorandum does not include Nixon's decision, and there appear to be no official documents documenting the moment when "nuclear ambiguity" became a joint policy between the United States and Israel. Cohen believes that Nixon and the new (then) Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, must have agreed on basic rules for the nuclear program during a bilateral meeting in the White House, held in September of that year without aides present.

Although there is no written record of this discussion, a subsequent memo from Kissinger to Nixon referred to the president's "private discussions" with Meir, explaining that "Nixon's primary concern was that the Israelis not make any overt move to disclose nuclear weapons or initiate a nuclear testing program." After that meeting, American pressure on Israel regarding the development of its nuclear weapons faded almost completely.

In the 1970s, press reports and occasional government leaks strongly suggested that Israel had developed a nuclear bomb, but in 1986 any international doubts were dispelled when Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Dimona reactor, revealed details of Israel's nuclear programme, providing the Sunday Times of London with photographs of the facility that he had secretly taken. Before the newspaper published the investigative report, a young Mossad agent lured Vanunu to Rome, where the Israeli intelligence service drugged him and transferred him to an Israeli naval cargo ship that was waiting in international waters. That's according to a 1999 book by Peter Hunnam, the journalist who conducted that investigation.

Despite Hounam's testimony on behalf of Vanunu during the widely publicized trial, Vanunu was convicted on charges of treason and espionage, and spent 18 years in Israeli prisons, most of which he spent in solitary confinement. The end of the Cold War led to the disappearance of a large part of the original justifications for the policy of "nuclear ambiguity" adopted by Israel. Israel no longer faces a real existential threat from Arab countries, and the Soviet Union is no longer a potential party that might encourage nuclear proliferation in the region.

The New Yorker magazine reported in 2018 that this change in circumstances alarmed Israeli officials, prompting them to secretly seek written guarantees - worded in vague terms in keeping with their policy of ambiguity - that the United States would not ask them to give up their nuclear weapons; These guarantees began during the administration of President Bill Clinton. Later, the secrecy eased somewhat; Government censorship in Israel allows discussion of nuclear weapons, provided that publishers attach an explanatory statement stating that the information is contained “according to foreign reports.”

In an interview with Ofek News Network in 2018, when Netanyahu was asked about his country’s nuclear capabilities, he did not deny their existence, but rather reiterated that Israel “will not be the first to introduce” these weapons into the region. However, the official view remains that neither the United States nor Israel has confirmed that the latter possesses nuclear weapons, despite estimates by the non-profit Nuclear Threat Initiative organization that the Israeli arsenal includes about 90 nuclear warheads.

Rubio's statement in June, combined with mounting pressure from some US lawmakers, suggests that the denialist approach may be beginning to unravel. This adds a new dimension to tensions in the Middle East, which have already been exacerbated by the war with Iran, and the military advances of the Houthis in Yemen - who are now threatening shipping traffic in the Red Sea - among other issues.

It is also unclear how Trump's plan to reduce military aid will affect the policy of "ambiguity." Kroenig - who also represents the literary legacy of Henry Kissinger - believes that the Iranian program, which has become more "clear", has prompted regional countries, such as Saudi Arabia, to adopt a "hedging" strategy.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has repeatedly threatened that his country will continue developing nuclear weapons if Iran obtains a nuclear bomb. There is a nuclear agreement currently under review in Congress between the United States and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which may open the door for Riyadh to enrich uranium on its soil, provided that specific conditions are met, including obtaining US approval.

Although months have passed since the war with the United States and Israel, Iran still possesses about 1,000 pounds (about 450 kilograms) of highly enriched uranium, even though eliminating this stockpile was one of the main goals of the war for Washington and Tel Aviv. Although a large portion of this uranium is located in facilities that were bombed by the United States last year, James Acton, an expert on nuclear non-proliferation issues at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Ofoq News that he believes there is a “50% chance that Iran will obtain the nuclear bomb” within the next three years.

For his part, Castro, a congressman from Texas, believes that the policy of ambiguity pursued by the United States towards the Israeli nuclear arsenal was at one time the right policy, but he believes that the time has come to abandon it. “A lot has changed since the decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s; the geopolitical world today is very different from what it was then, and yet the politics of ‘ambiguity’ has remained constant,” Castro said.

Kroenig believes that Iran conducting a nuclear test represents a “clear” scenario under which the United States and Israel should abandon their policy of ambiguity. Kroenig argues that if Iran were to develop a nuclear weapon, Israel would have to talk publicly about its nuclear strategy and policies, and conduct military exercises with the aim of creating a “credible” nuclear deterrent against Tehran.

However, he does not believe that the United States and Israel should acknowledge the existence of Israel's nuclear arsenal at this time, whether this scenario comes true or if another regional adversary obtains the bomb. As for Castro, he argued - during a discussion between him and Rubio in the Capitol building in June - that the possession of nuclear weapons by one side in the Israeli-Iranian conflict raises enough concern to prompt a public debate on the matter.

Castro expressed concerns about what "red lines" Israel might set for the use of its nuclear weapons, especially in light of the presence of US forces deployed in the region. Rubio avoided going into details, indicating that he would be able to speak more freely in a secret (closed) meeting.

“Such matters require careful balancing of different interests and considerations,” Rubio said.