Iran’s nuclear activities have been on the front pages for years although it remains unclear precisely how close Tehran is to building its first bomb. Iran’s relative failure in preserving the secrecy of its weapons aspirations stands in sharp contrast to the experience of Israel, the first and only Middle Eastern state to acquire nuclear weapons. During the 1960s, Israel built the bomb in near-absolute secrecy—even deceiving the U.S. government about its activities and goals.
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, during a period when only three countries had nuclear weapons. A decade later, on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel secretly assembled its first nuclear devices.
Against stiff U.S. opposition, led by President John F. Kennedy, 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 memory of the Holocaust. Audacity, trickery, and deception were key aspects of the relentless execution of Israel’s nuclear journey.
Last month, the George Washington University’s National Security Archive posted a new Electronic Briefing Book that includes 20 documents on Israel’s nuclear project. Those reports shed light on what the U.S. 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. 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 a 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. U.S. internal discussions focused on assessing the nature and motivation of the project, whether it was for weapons (i.e. plutonium production), power production, or research. While some in Washington suspected from the start that the Dimona project was about weapons production, they could not prove it; there was no smoking gun.