A Look At How Israel Kept Its Nuclear Weapons Program Secret

Lead image by Courtesy of National Security Archives.

Avner Cohen and William Burr, Politico: How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program

An exclusive look inside newly declassified documents shows how Israel blocked U.S. efforts to uncover its secret nuclear reactor.

For decades, the world has known that the massive Israeli facility near Dimona, in the Negev Desert, was the key to its secret nuclear project. Yet, for decades, the world—and Israel—knew that Israel had once misleadingly referred to it as a “textile factory.” Until now, though, we’ve never known how that myth began—and how quickly the United States saw through it. The answers, as it turns out, are part of a fascinating tale that played out in the closing weeks of the Eisenhower administration—a story that begins with the father of Secretary of State John Kerry and a familiar charge that the U.S. intelligence community failed to “connect the dots.”

WNU Editor: I would disagree on how well they kept their nuclear program secret. Everyone had suspicions going back decades, and when Mordechai Vanunu .... an Israeli nuclear technician who revealed the program in the 1980s .... the jig was up. The only thing that we do not know for sure today (at least publicly) are the exact numbers and kiloton-age of Israel's weapons.