[News] A brief history of the Israeli nuclear program, the open secret at the heart of the Iran war

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2026/04/a-brief-history-of-the-israeli-nuclear-program-the-open-secret-at-the-heart-of-the-iran-war/?ml_recipient=184000856790664279&ml_link=184000836172514469&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2026-04-06&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation+-+8am>
A brief history of the Israeli nuclear program, the open secret at the
heart of the Iran war
Anna Illing
April 5, 2026
------------------------------
[image: image.png]

Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona, photographed by American
reconnaissance satellite KH-4 CORONA on November 11, 1968. (Image:
Wikimedia)

The current U.S.-Israeli w ar 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
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/explainers/what-do-we-know-about-israels-nuclear-weapons>
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
<https://armscontrolcenter.org/countries/israel/> 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
<https://en.majalla.com/node/324252/documents-memoirs/how-israel-deceived-us-and-built-bomb>
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”
<https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/revisiting-1979-vela-mystery-report-critical-oral-history-conference>
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
<https://rightlivelihood.org/the-change-makers/find-a-laureate/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
<https://www.haaretz.com/2006-04-30/ty-article/declassified-article-shows-how-nixon-okayed-israels-nuclear-ambiguity/0000017f-e47f-d75c-a7ff-fcfff56a0000>“:
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
<https://publicintegrity.org/national-security/the-47-year-old-nuclear-elephant-in-the-room/>:
“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
<https://www.democracynow.org/2009/2/10/headlines/obama_ducks_question_on_israeli_nukes>
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
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/aug/04/energy.past>
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
<https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/israel-nuclear-weapons-secret-united-states/380237/>
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
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2014/12/2/un-vote-urges-israel-to-renounce-nuclear-arms>
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 <https://www.nti.org/countries/israel/> 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
<https://armscontrolcenter.org/israeli-nuclear-weapons-at-the-heart-of-a-strategic-taboo/>
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
<https://www.cfr.org/articles/israels-nuclear-weapons-program-and-lessons-iran>.
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
<https://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-president-turn-out-to-welcome-israels-newest-submarine/>:
*“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
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-05/ty-article-live/u-s-efforts-for-a-ceasefire-increase-as-israeli-forces-make-their-way-deeper-into-gaza/0000018b-9d1a-d27d-a9fb-dfbbfcc60000?liveBlogItemId=1380721973#1380721973>
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
<https://armscontrolcenter.org/countries/israel/> 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 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i03vW40EDI8>
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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