A long history of denial. How did Israel continue to lie about its nuclear arsenal?

Translation Introduction

The statement of the Israeli Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu, during which he called for striking Gaza with nuclear weapons, provoked a wave of widespread criticism internationally, and even inside Israel, part of these criticisms (especially internal ones) is not only due to the brutality and bloodiness of this proposal, as Israel is practicing brutal bombardment against Gaza that has killed at least 11,<> people so far and does not mind killing more in cold blood, as much as it is due to the fact that this statement broke a decades-old internal policy. It relates to Israel's "nuclear ambiguity."

So how did this policy come about? Why did Israel deliberately cover up its possession of nuclear weapons? That's what Douglas Birch and Jeffrey Smith answer in their 2014 article in The Atlantic, which we are publishing in translation today because of its importance in this area.

Translation text

In a statement during confirmation hearings in the Senate in 2006, Robert Gates, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), stated that Iran is surrounded by "powers that possess nuclear weapons," including "Israel, which lies west of Iran." Former US President Jimmy Carter confirmed this twice, once in 2008 and again in 2014 during interviews and speeches in which he asserted that the number of Israeli nuclear warheads until that time was between 150 and 300.

But, because of the strangeness of some laws protecting federal secrecy rules, those who work for the U.S. government and hold security clearances are usually not allowed to make such statements. In fact, U.S. officials – even those in Congress – receive constant and repeated warnings against mentioning the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal, and if they do not distance themselves from the topic, the authorities will not hesitate to find a way to punish them.

In 2014, the US policy of protecting Israel's nuclear program sparked controversy, yet American silence in this regard remained unwavering one iota. (Photo: Getty Images)

The policy of not publicly asserting the existence of an Israeli nuclear arsenal — once described by one scientist as "one of the world's worst kept secrets" — dates back to a political agreement between the United States and Israel in the late sixties. This policy has helped Israel maintain a unique military posture in the Middle East while avoiding the pressure, criticism, or boos typically leveled at the world's eight recognized nuclear powers.

But in 2014, the U.S. policy of protecting Israel's nuclear program sparked controversy, in part because it played a role in criticism of a well-known researcher at a national weapons laboratory in July of that year, after he published an article acknowledging that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. about the U.S.-led planning for a possible convention to ban nuclear weapons anywhere in the region.

Yet America's silence in this regard has remained unwavering one iota. A former senior State Department official, who dealt with nuclear issues during the Bush administration and declined to be named due to the political sensitivity surrounding the issue, explained: "We will not categorically admit that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, but we have to express this in another formulation that is more inclined to assume or speculate that Israel possesses nuclear weapons."

Barack Obama came at his first press conference at the White House in 2009 to confirm the continuation of this US policy, which was adopted by the state four decades ago and is still ongoing until now. When asked by journalist Helen Thomas if he knew of any countries in the Middle East that possessed nuclear weapons, Obama replied: "As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, I refuse to speculate about their existence." Obama acted at the time as if Israel's known status as a nuclear-weapon state was nothing more than rumors and assumptions.

This caution became a basic approach adopted by everyone, including Paul Pilar, a former U.S. intelligence officer for the Middle East, who became so reticent when referring directly or publicly to Israel's nuclear arsenal, that when he wrote an article in The National Interest titled "Suspects Not to Say About Israel," he referred to nuclear warheads throughout the article as kumquats.

Even the U.S. Congress has remained cautious about discussing the subject. When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee published a 2008 report, "A Chain of Reactions: Avoiding a Nuclear Arms Race in the Middle East," the report included chapters on Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey, but for some reason did not mention Israel among them. In that 61-page report, the authors completely ignored Israel's nuclear arsenal, and all they did was mention it in a small margin suggesting that it was merely a "perception or assumption."

More specifically, the report states: "Although Israel has not officially admitted to possessing nuclear weapons, there appears to be broad agreement in the Middle East and among experts in the United States that Israel possesses a number of nuclear weapons. For neighboring countries, this perception is even more important to them because it will play a key role in shaping policies and making decisions."

Bureaucracy does not accept frankness

In his article, Doyle offered a scathing assessment of Western nuclear policy when he said, "Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, nor did they deter Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War." (Photo: Reuters)

Former senior White House or cabinet-level officials, such as Robert Gates, who has stated that Iran is surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons in its arsenal, such as Israel, may eventually survive in one form or another after their statements, but the bureaucracy does not openly accept junior officials, as shown by James Doyle, a senior nuclear expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory, who was criticized after publishing an article in February 2013. In the British magazine Survival, he expresses his point of view that is slightly at odds with the official policy of the US government.

Doyle offered a scathing assessment of Western nuclear policy when he said: "Nuclear weapons did not deter Egypt and Syria from attacking Israel in 1973, nor did they prevent Argentina from attacking British territory in the 1982 Falkland Islands War, nor did they deter Iraq from attacking Israel during the 1991 Gulf War." But the comments angered his superiors at the nuclear weapons laboratory and fueled the displeasure of a Republican employee of the House Armed Services Committee.

Although three confidentiality specialists evaluated Doyle's article and asserted that it contained no classified information, important officials decided to override the assessment of these specialists and claimed an unspecified violation, used it as a justification to punish Doyle, and withheld the article as classified after it was published. Not only that, they deducted his salary, checked his computer at home, and eventually fired him. Afterwards, they stated that his expulsion was not related to the content of the article, but Doyle and his lawyers believe his expulsion was certainly punishment for questioning U.S. principles of nuclear deterrence.

James Doyle, senior nuclear expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory (Photo: Media)

Neither Doyle nor his colleagues disclosed whether it was the sentence in his article about Israel's arsenal of nuclear weapons that provoked officials and led them to criticize the article excessively as a security violation from their point of view, yet many independent experts hypothesized that it was the cause. As the days went by, another possible explanation emerged as to why Doyle was treated so badly, as explained by Stephen Latergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the American Federation of Scientists.

Aftergood discovered that the U.S. Department of Energy cited specific information to classify the Doyle documents, originally stemming from a classification document WNP-136 (a classified document related to foreign countries' nuclear energy capabilities). Although the text of the document itself is not public or publicly available, Aftergood still believes that the hints in this case make it clear that Doyle's only reference to a sensitive foreign nuclear program was about Israel, which is likely why laboratories used it against him.

The beginning of the project

Historian Avner Cohen writes that the US commitment to the policy of not officially disclosing the presence of nuclear weapons in Israel appears to have arisen following a September 1969 meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. (Getty Images)

According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (a nonprofit organization in Washington that tracks nuclear weapons developments), Israel's nuclear weapons program began in the fifties, and Israel is believed to have begun assembling its first three nuclear weapons during the crisis that led to the 1967 war. For decades, Israel has adopted a policy dubbed "amimut," which means ambiguity or lack of clarity to refer to its nuclear program. By relying on the insinuation that it possesses nuclear weapons without confirming it, Israel has sought to deter its enemies from launching major attacks while discouraging any efforts to develop a similar nuclear arsenal.

Israeli-American historian Avner Cohen writes that the US commitment to the policy of not officially disclosing the presence of nuclear weapons in Israel appears to have arisen following a September 1969 meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Although there is no written transcript for the meeting, Cohen stated that it is clear that the two leaders reached an agreement that Israel will not conduct nuclear tests of its weapons or declare their existence, while the United States will not pressure Israel to give up these weapons or to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and will stop inspecting the Dimona site, which houses Israel's Negev Nuclear Energy Research Center.

As a result of the deal, Washington embraced Israel's secret as if it were its own, and in the end the United States accepted that its official policy would be similar to that of Israel regarding its nuclear program, something some senior U.S. officials initially strongly opposed. The repeated official narrative consistently circulating by Israeli sources asserts that "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, as well as its support for the idea that this region will be free of all weapons of mass destruction after peace is achieved."

One irony emerged when Nixon's aides sought assurances that this promise meant that Israel would not actually build any nuclear bombs, but Israeli officials responded that the phrase "introducing nuclear weapons" had a different meaning: Israel would not conduct public testing or officially acknowledge the existence of nuclear bombs, leaving ample room for its unacknowledged arsenal to wreak havoc without checks or reckoning. In July 1969, then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote to President Nixon in a memo summarizing Washington's policy toward Israel's nuclear weapons program: "We may want to actually prevent Israel, but if we can't do that, at least what we want is to prevent international recognition of Israel's nuclear weapons."

Mordechai Vanunu, one of the technicians who worked at the Dimona site, which houses Israel's Nuclear Energy Research Center. (Getty Images)

Even when Mordechai Vanunu, one of the technicians who worked at the Dimona site, home to Israel's Nuclear Energy Research Center, gave the first detailed public report on the nuclear program in 1986 and published photographs he took there of nuclear weapons components, both sides (the United States and Israel) refused to change their position or policy. After his abduction from Italy, Israel imprisoned him for 18 years, mostly in solitary confinement, and was later banned from traveling abroad or dealing with foreign journalists. In an email exchanged with the Center for Public Integrity (an investigative journalism organization concerned with exposing abuse of power and corruption in public institutions), Vanunu noted that he still faces restrictions but did not elaborate.

A former U.S. intelligence official reported that he remembers how completely stunned he was at the absence of any mention of Israel in a classified document purporting to describe all foreign nuclear weapons programs in the nineties, which is why he sent a complaint to his colleagues: "It seems that we are facing a real problem if we are not even able to admit the truth in classified documents." But in the end, he got a signal allowing him to mention Israel's nuclear arsenal, but only slightly and in hesitant, conventional wording.

In the same vein, Gary Samour, who served as President Obama's senior nonproliferation adviser from 2009 to 2013, stated that the United States has long preferred that Israel stick to its so-called "nuclear secrecy" policy for fear of increasing tensions in the Middle East. Samur argues that Israel's admission of the existence of nuclear weapons would be provocative and could prompt some Arab countries and Iran to develop nuclear weapons, which is why the United States tends to deliberately ambiguity. But when Samour, who now works at Harvard University, was asked whether the fact that Israel possessed nuclear weapons was secret, he replied: "It doesn't seem secret to me at all."

The official silence of the U.S. government remained and was broken only by accident, when in 1979 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) released a four-page intelligence report titled "Prospects for Further Nuclear Proliferation," which reads: "We believe that Israel has already produced nuclear weapons, based on its vast uranium stockpile, uranium enrichment program, and its investments in an expensive missile system capable of carrying nuclear warheads."

The report sparked a flurry of headlines, including the New York Times: "The CIA stated in 1979 that Israel possesses nuclear bombs," while a similar headline in the Washington Star newspaper: "Israel has been a member of the nuclear club since 1974, according to the CIA study."

One ridiculous situation is what happened to John Debris, the intelligence officer in charge of nuclear proliferation issues at the time, who had a duty to review and redact classified material from the report before it was published, but pointed to a setback in the process of stripping classified information in the report before its publication, which led to the leakage of classified information to the public by saying: "The strange thing is that the parts that I preferred to block were published, while the parts that were supposed to go out to the public were blocked."

It seems to have been a kind of traditional administrative mistake for Debres: "What happened is one of the common types of bureaucratic failure, people misinterpreted my instructions." He stressed that – to his knowledge – no one was punished for this error, even in 2008, when the National Security Agency obtained a copy of the document under the Freedom of Information Act, this decision remained uncorrected or rescinded.

But Washington's continued refusal to assert the obvious in any other way ultimately led to bizarre and difficult experiments involving those looking for official data on Israel's nuclear arsenal. Brian Seibert, the most senior executive in the U.S. Department of Energy and an expert on protecting nuclear weapons secrets from 1992 to 2002, recalls seeing a pile of papers nearly two meters high containing documents from the CIA, the FBI, the Justice Department, as well as the Department of Energy, about Israel's nuclear program.

John Fitzpatrick, who has served as director of the Federal Office of Information Security Surveillance since 2011, confirmed that the United States considers aspects of Israel's nuclear posture to be classified and must be maintained: "We know this from the authorities involved in classified matters in the agencies that deal with these materials," but declined to provide further details. While the states continued to avoid the subject, official Israeli authorities adopted the same position, with Kerry Brody, director of communications at the Israeli embassy in Washington, confirming that no individual at the embassy could discuss Israel's nuclear posture, writing in an email, "Unfortunately, we have no comment we can make at this time."

On the other hand, former Israeli Knesset Speaker Avraham Borg appeared less conservative during a December 2013 conference in Haifa, when he noted that Israel possesses nuclear and chemical weapons, describing the policy of ambiguity as "outdated and childish." However, Robert Gates, the former director of the CIA, has refused to discuss the issue, but a growing number of U.S. experts agree with Borg that he is unreserved about this policy of ambiguity.

Paul Pilar, a former U.S. intelligence officer for the Middle East, wrote in an article that the 45-year U.S. policy to protect Israel's program is no longer seen around the world as a policy of double standards, but the world sees the United States living inside a big lie that it has woven itself. America's statements about nuclear weapons are no longer taken seriously, and sometimes even contemptuously as long as it speaks of Israel's nuclear weapons as the "golden orange."

Viktor Jelensky, a physicist and former member of the Nuclear Regulatory Committee, expressed dismay at the United States' pretense of ignorance about Israel's nuclear bombs, which he made clear in his recent book that such a position is no longer acceptable, as clear double standards are undermining efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons around the world. J. William Leonard, who was director of the Office of Information Security Control under George W. Bush from 2002 to 2008, commented: "Sometimes these double-standard policies undermine the classified information system, and it has become very strange and embarrassing to exploit this system to protect an officially known secret."

Finally, Dana H. Allen, editor of Doyle's article for Survival, concludes with a recent commentary published by the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London: "Anyone with superficial knowledge of international affairs certainly knows about these weapons." He also called the government's claim that the article contained security secrets "naïve," and concluded that Doyle's plight at the hands of the authorities was an experiment that was as illogical and disturbing as Kafka's literary works (famous for portraying complex and turbulent situations and bureaucratic control that permeates people's lives)*.

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* Translator Note

Translation: Somaya Zaher

This report is translated from The Atlantic and does not necessarily reflect Meydan's website.