How Israel deceived the United States about its nuclear weapons program

Washington Post

5 days ago

'Remember, Iran cannot have any nuclear weapons. Very simple. Don't have to go too deep into it. They just can't have nuclear weapons.'
— President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters, June 17, 2025
'Iran's leaders should understand that I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.'
— President Barack Obama, speaking to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, March 4, 2012
'I believe they want to have the capacity, the knowledge, in order to make a nuclear weapon. And I know it's in the world's interest to prevent them from doing so.'
— President George W. Bush, remarks to reporters, Oct. 17, 2007
Ever since Iran's nuclear program was first revealed in 2002, American presidents have said they are determined to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Iran has been a member of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) since 1970, which commits non-nuclear-weapons nations to not acquire nuclear weapons and agree to regular international inspections. But Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, before he was overthrown in the 1979 revolution, also strafed at U.S. efforts to restrain his nuclear ambitions. U.S. officials suspected he wanted a bomb. Only five years after his fall, the Islamic Republic began a secret effort to produce the fissile material needed for nuclear weapons.
The exposure of Iran's program led to a long cat-and-mouse game of negotiations and inspections, culminating in a 2015 international agreement, led by the United States, in which Iran was permanently prohibited from acquiring nuclear weapons. Iran also agreed to be subject to certain restrictions and additional monitoring indefinitely. Like many complex negotiations, the deal was criticized as inadequate (especially by Israel). In 2018, Trump withdrew the United States from it and claimed he would negotiate a better one.
He never did, and here we are — with Trump on Saturday ordering U.S. forces to bomb Iranian nuclear facilities, in effect joining Israel's week-long assault on Iranian nuclear facilities and scientists.
But this history lesson is not about Iran's program. It's about Israel's nuclear program — and how Jerusalem, too, deceived American officials about its intentions. If Iran has followed a playbook of nuclear deception, it was written by Israel.
As of 2021, Israel is believed to possess 90 nuclear warheads for delivery by aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles, and possibly sea-based cruise missiles, according to an estimate by researchers at the Federation of American Scientists.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, decided in the mid-1950s that Israel needed a nuclear weapon as an insurance policy against its Arab neighbors. In the 1950s and 1960s, Israel secretly acquired the technology and material to build nuclear weapons, frequently misleading the U.S. government (and other governments) about its intentions.
After the Suez crisis of 1956, sparked by Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal, French officials felt a 'sense of debt' to Israel for failing to fulfill commitments in the misbegotten adventure, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia. In secret, France helped Israel build the Dimona reactor in the Negev desert, with plans for a chemical reprocessing plant deep underground not committed to paper.
When French officials began to have second thoughts about the project and pressed Israel to stop work, Israel proposed a compromise: France would help finish the job and not insist on international inspections in return for Israeli assurances that they had no intention of making nuclear weapons.
Meanwhile, Norway supplied heavy water, which helps control nuclear reactions, after receiving assurances that Israel's intentions were peaceful.
When U.S. intelligence discovered the secret facility deep in the desert late in the 1950s, Israeli officials lied to the American embassy and said it was only a textile plant. When that turned out to be false, Israeli officials offered another explanation: It was purely a metallurgical research installation that did not contain the chemical reprocessing plant needed to produce nuclear weapons.
In December 1960, Ben-Gurion revealed the facility in a speech in the Knesset, saying the 24-megawatt reactor at Dimona would not be completed for four years. It was, he said, 'intended exclusively for peaceful purposes.'
Newly elected U.S. President John F. Kennedy, alarmed about the potential spread of nuclear weapons, pressed Israeli officials for regular inspections of Dimona. A 1961 team concluded the site lacked the necessary facilities — such as plutonium reprocessing — needed for a weapons program. Yet U.S. officials wanted regular inspections so they could assure Arab nations, especially Egypt, that Israel did not have a secret bomb program.
The diplomatic record, obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, shows that Israel put off or delayed additional inspections until Kennedy sent a blunt message in July 1963 to a new Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol. (Originally the letter was drafted for Ben-Gurion but he resigned before it could be delivered.)
The U.S. commitment to Israel 'could be seriously jeopardized if it should be thought we were unable to obtain reliable information on a subject so vital to peace as the question of Israel's effort in the nuclear field,' Kennedy wrote, adding that U.S. scientists should have unlimited access to all sites at the Dimona complex.
A month later Eshkol responded, underscoring the plant's peaceful uses. In 1964, a U.S. inspection team confirmed that there was no weapons-making capability.
But the inspectors were operating under a false assumption — that Israel had no plutonium reprocessing plant. In reality, one was built beneath the reactor. Israelis had built fake walls around the elevators that led to it.
Seymour Hersh's 1991 book 'The Sampson Option' detailed the scheme: 'A false control room was constructed at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation. There were extensive practice sessions in the fake control room, as Israeli technicians sought to avoid any slips when the Americans arrived. The goal was to convince the inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible.'
By 1968, the CIA was convinced Israel had nuclear weapons — just as negotiations on the NPT were completed and the treaty designed to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons was opened for signature by members of the United Nations. U.S. officials concluded it was too late to turn back the clock and make Israel abandon its nuclear capability.
In a private one-on-one White House meeting on Sept. 26, 1969, then-President Richard M. Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir cut a secret deal: Israel would not test its weapons or acknowledge them, and in return the United States would end its Dimona visits and stop pressuring Israel to sign the NPT. A memo from then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger indicates Nixon pressed Meir not to visibly introduce nuclear weapons in the region.
In 1979, a U.S. satellite (known as Vela 6911) designed to monitor compliance with the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty detected a possible nuclear test off the coast of South Africa. Then-President Jimmy Carter and other U.S. officials suspected this was an Israeli test, which if true would have been in violation of the Nixon-Meir agreement.
Yet Leonard Weiss, a congressional aide at the time, wrote in 2011 that both the Carter and Reagan administrations ignored or played down intelligence information pointing to Israel. 'The weight of the evidence that the Vela event was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa appears overwhelming,' Weiss said, citing the views of top intelligence and scientific officials as well as Carter's published diary notes. But Israel has never officially acknowledged the test, and other experts remain skeptical of the evidence and that such a cover-up took place.
Israel misled even its strongest backer, the United States, about its nuclear ambitions, believing that an atomic bomb would be an insurance policy against overwhelming force by its hostile neighbors. Israel's actions do not excuse Iran's deceptions. But the American failure to halt Israel's bomb effort shows how difficult it is to keep the nuclear genie in the bottle — and the U.S.'s ultimate acceptance of Israel's nuclear stockpile has invited charges of a double standard in the Middle East for more than half a century.
Meanwhile, Iran is in a tough neighborhood, surrounded by countries (Russia, India, Pakistan and Israel) that possess nuclear weapons. Just as the shah wanted an insurance policy, so apparently did the mullahs that overthrew him. In fact, if regime change someday takes place in Iran, there's no guarantee that Iran's new leadership wouldn't seek nuclear weapons either, even if every nuclear facility in the country today was destroyed.
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