Hidden History: How Israel Acquired Nukes

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On June 13th, the Zionist entity carried out a wide-ranging, unprovoked, criminal military strike on Iran, purportedly to dent the Islamic Republic’s quest to develop nuclear weapons. Tehran has consistently repudiated any suggestion it harbours such ambitions. A November 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate concurred, expressing “high confidence that in fall 2003,” the country “halted” any and all research in the field. This assessment remained unchanged for several years subsequently, and was reportedly shared by Mossad.

By contrast, Benjamin Netanyahu has for decades declared almost annually Iran is mere years away from becoming a nuclear power, urging military action as a result. The longtime Israeli leader’s anxieties are sickly ironic, given Tel Aviv’s own nuclear weapons program is the worst kept ‘secret’ in international affairs. Over many years, multiple entity officials and prominent figures have effectively - or even directly - admitted this monstrous capacity. Moreover, Israel is avowedly committed to the ‘Samson Option’. 

Under its horrifying auspices, if the entity feels sufficiently threatened, it reserves the right to carry out preemptive nuclear strikes not merely on regional adversaries, but its Western sponsors into the bargain. As Dutch-born Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld boasted in September 2003:

“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets…We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

Despite such flagrant disclosures, the Zionist entity rigidly sticks to a policy of “deliberate ambiguity”, refusing to formally confirm or deny it possesses nuclear weapons. When one of Netanyahu’s ministers openly advocated nuking Gaza in November 2023, they were reprimanded and suspended. Such punishment pales in comparison to the fate of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician who revealed details of Tel Aviv’s nuclear weapons program to the British media in 1986.

Lured to Rome by Mossad, he was then rendered to the Zionist entity and convicted in a secret trial. Vanunu subsequently spent 18 years in prison, the majority of which in solitary confinement. Since release in 2004, he has been subject to a broad array of restrictions on his speech and movement, and repeatedly arrested and jailed for violating the stringent terms of his parole. All along, organisations including Amnesty International have condemned Tel Aviv’s brazen breaches of Vanunu’s basic human rights.

Mordechai Vanunu holds a newspaper front page outlining his revelations, 2004

At the time of Vanunu’s heroic whistleblowing, Western governments and intelligence agencies had been aware of - and deeply concerned by - Israel’s development of nuclear weapons for almost three decades. How the Zionist entity acquired nukes is a little-known tale, of theft, deception, shadowy spy games, dangerous connivances, and more. Its full dimensions remain indeterminate today. However, given current events, it is vital what’s known about this sordid hidden history is told.

‘Face Value’

Israel’s nuclear weapons program was, from inception, “a secret within a secret”. In 1957, France inked a covert agreement with the Zionist entity, leading to the creation of the Dimona nuclear power facility. Paris was apparently unaware the complex would soon form the basis of a clandestine underground reprocessing facility, capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium. The US was seemingly ignorant of Dimona’s existence, let alone its utility for producing nukes, until December 1960.

That month, a classified CIA assessment outlined “implications of the acquisition by Israel of a nuclear weapons capability.” The document expressed little doubt that a “major purpose” of Dimona was “plutonium production for weapons,” and detailed multiple grave outcomes of Tel Aviv’s push for nukes. For one, exposure of the program would inevitably cause “consternation” in North Africa and West Asia, potentially prompting “threatened” Arab and Muslim states to turn to the Soviet Union for military assistance.

Aerial photo of the Dimona complex, November 1968

Furthermore, the CIA predicted Western interests in the region more widely could come under attack, and the Israeli initiative “might remove some of the inhibitions to development of nuclear weapons” elsewhere in the world. On January 19th 1961, the day before his inauguration, John F. Kennedy and his incoming administration visited the White House to meet with outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Israel’s nuclear program loomed large in discussions between the two statesmen.

On January 31st that year, Kennedy met with Eisenhower’s departing ambassador to Israel Ogden Reid, for a comprehensive briefing. Declassified records refer to the President’s “special interest” in Dimona. While a member of Congress during the 1950s, Kennedy had repeatedly taken a righteously robust stand against not only nuclear proliferation, but testing, believing the latter encouraged the former. He was implacably opposed to Tel Aviv securing nukes, and immediately upon taking office began intensely pressuring then-Israeli premier David Ben-Gurion to allow regular US inspections of Dimona. 

Reid told Kennedy he believed Ben-Gurion’s “assurances” Dimona was a mere “research reactor”, intended to “serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health, and science”, could be taken at “face value”. The President strongly disagreed, and informed the Israeli Prime Minister in no uncertain terms regular inspections of Dimona were a core condition for harmonious US-Israeli relations. Tel Aviv finally folded in May 1961, and an American inspection team was dispatched to the site.

Their report concluded Dimona was strictly intended for nuclear power generation purposes, without military application. This false finding was achieved by French and Israeli technicians outright lying to US inspectors, while undertaking extensive efforts to camouflage and conceal areas of the plant dedicated to research and development of nukes. It was not until March 1967 that a State Department Intelligence and Research report uncovered this rank subterfuge, and that Tel Aviv had the ability to produce nuclear weapons at the complex.

‘Atrociously Incompetent’ 

In the intervening time, multiple US investigations of Dimona reached the same conclusion as the first. Yet, until his death in November 1963, Kennedy remained convinced the Zionist entity was determined to develop nuclear weapons, and may have already done so. Six months before his assassination, he wrote a private telegram to Ben-Gurion, warning of “the disturbing effects on world stability which would accompany the development of a nuclear weapons capability by Israel.” He also stressed the “urgency” of regular Dimona inspections.

Given the President’s visceral hostility to Israel’s nuke ambitions, it is hardly surprising theories have abounded for years Tel Aviv was one way or another involved in his murder. In 2004, Mordechai Vanunu explicitly levelled the charge, stating there were “near-certain indications” Kennedy was assassinated due to “pressure he exerted” on Ben-Gurion to “shed light on Dimona’s nuclear reactor.” No smoking gun evidence supporting this allegation has emerged since, although sensitive documents recently released upon Donald Trump’s order unambiguously point in this direction.

In 1992, investigative journalist Samuel Katz posited veteran CIA counterintelligence chief James Jesus Angleton secretly directed clandestine Agency assistance to Israel’s nuclear weapons program for years. Fast forward to today, and the freshly-declassified JFK records amply expose how Angleton, one of the Agency’s founders, systematically abused his position to assist the Zionist entity throughout his lengthy tenure. Among the newly-declassified files is a June 1953 memo stating Angleton’s primary intelligence source was Israel.

June 1975 FBI report on James Jesus Angleton’s routine contact with Israeli intelligence

Other declassified documents indicate Angleton was effectively running an agency within an agency in the CIA, with Tel Aviv the ultimate beneficiary. A June 1975 FBI report on “Israeli intelligence collection capabilities” in the US outlines Angleton’s “special relationship” with the entity in some detail, noting he routinely delivered “extremely sensitive information” in person to Israel’s Washington DC embassy. Simultaneously, the Bureau was into the 10th year of its probe into how 93 kilograms of highly-enriched uranium mysteriously vanished from Washington’s Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation.

CIA chief Richard Helms demands Attorney General Ramsey Clark instigate an FBI probe into NUMEC’s chief, April 1968

Centre of the CIA-instigated FBI investigation was NUMEC president Zalman Shapiro, a hardcore Zionist with high-level government contacts and significant business interests in Israel. This included a contract to build nuclear-powered generators. Officially, the NUMEC scandal remains unsolved today, despite dedicated inquiries by the Atomic Energy Commission, Bureau, CIA, and other US government agencies lasting many years. A scathing 1978 review by Washington’s Comptroller General concluded investigating authorities deliberately sabotaged their probes into the uranium loss, for the Zionist entity’s benefit:

“The NUMEC incident and its associated 13-year investigation highlight this country’s current inability to effectively deal with possible diversions of nuclear material…The US needs to improve its efforts for effectively responding to and investigating incidents of missing or unaccounted for weapons-grade nuclear materials…We believe a timely, concerted effort on the part of these…agencies would have greatly aided and possibly solved the NUMEC diversion questions, if they desired.”

There was an obvious motivation for the CIA, FBI et al not “desiring” to solve the riddle of where NUMEC’s missing highly-enriched uranium ended up. As Kennedy assassination expert Jefferson Morley has told mainstream news networks, Israel’s man in Langley James Jesus Angleton placed the President’s alleged killer Lee Harvey Oswald under Agency surveillance in November 1959. This amounted to intensively “monitoring his politics, his personal life, his foreign travels, his contacts” until the day the President was killed. Morley explained the significance of this thus:

“Angleton had a 180-page file on Oswald on his desk a week before Kennedy went to Dallas in November 1963…So what this story raises is the question: was the CIA incredibly, atrociously incompetent when it comes to Lee Harvey Oswald, or was Angleton actually running an operation involving Oswald?”