Updated 6 May, 2026 05:50
ARCHIVEAL PHOTO: atomic power plant close Dimona, Israel, March 8, 2014 © Getty Images / AFP / Jack Guez
A group of 30 Democrats in the U.S. home of Representatives requested the administration of president Donald Trump to disclose information about the Israeli atomic arsenal and its policies. deficiency of transparency threatens the full mediate East, the legislators argue.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the possession of atomic weapons nor provided a public doctrine indicating the possible usage of atomic weapons, or ‘red linesIt’s okay. ”
The United States, which has known about the Israeli atomic program since at least the early 1960s. The 20th century, they're silent about this.
Washington fights "to shoulder with a country whose possible atomic weapons program the United States government officially refuses to recognise" “They wrote congressmen led by Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
"The hazard of misassessment, escalation and usage of atomic weapons in this environment is not theoretical" – stated in the letter.
The Group demanded that the United States apply the same standards of transparency to Israel as to another countries, adding that otherwise "Coherent atomic non-proliferation policy for the mediate East", including the Iranian atomic program and Saudi Arabia's atomic ambitions, would be impossible.
How large is Israel's arsenal?
According to Stockholm global Institute for Peace investigation (SIPRI) Israel has between 80 and 90 atomic weapons, including about 30 bombs and 50 ballistic warheads.
Photos from inside an Israeli atomic facility that leaked to the Sunday Times in 1986 suggested that the country could then produce adequate material to produce as many as 200 atomic bombs.
Mordecai Wanun, a technician who revealed the photos, was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and sentenced to nearly 2 decades in prison.
When did Israel start its atomic program?
Israel reportedly pursued atomic ambitions shortly after its uprising in 1948. Ernst David Bergmann, the first head of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission, established in 1952, spoke of the atomic bomb as something that would ensure, "that we shall never be led like sheep to slaughter again."
The Negev atomic investigation Centre (NNRC) close the town of Dimona, built in the late 1950s, was allegedly designed to produce military-grade plutonium, according to a 1960 American intelligence report.
According to SIPRI, Israel could get its first atomic weapon in the late 1960s from a plutonium produced at the NNRC.
What did the United States know?
Washington knew that the NNRC had a weapon connection as early as December 1960, as stated by the Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, declassified in 2024. In 1967, Israeli soldiers informed the U.S. embassy that Israel was ‘a fewer weeks from’ bombs, according to another declassified documents.
In 1973 Washington "was convinced that Israel had atomic weapons," according to the Federation of American Scientists. In 1979, an American satellite detected a double flash off the coast of South Africa. Journals of erstwhile president Jimmy Carter of the White House, published in 2010, mentioned "growing conviction"That flash was an Israeli atomic test.
Leonard Weiss, a legislature advisor then informed of the case, claimed that both the Carter and Reagan administration had tried to silence him in connection with the incident. "I was told that if I said it was a test, the US would make a very serious problem in abroad policy. individual revealed something that the U.S. didn't want anyone to know" – said in an interview with ‘The Guardian” in 2014.
Why silence?
Declassified CIA files propose that the intelligence agency informed then president Lyndon Johnson of Israel's possession of atomic weapons in 1968.
The president ordered the then CIA director, Richard Helms, to keep this secret even from state secretary Dean Ruski and defence secretary Robert McNamara.
Washington allegedly feared that the arabian states would refuse to accede to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of atomic Weapons if information about Israel's unreported weapons came out.
The policy of silence was formalized at the gathering of US president Richard Nixon with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969, according to Avner Cohen, prof. at the Middlebury Institute of global Studies and author of the book "Israel and the Bomb".
"Israel alone would not be able to keep this policy for decades without the United States" – told the diary on Tuesday “Washington Post’.
