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HOW ISRAEL BECAME A NUCLEAR POWER  
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Emma Claire Foley
June 23, 2024
Jacobin
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_ Israel’s nuclear program is its worst-kept secret. It was made
possible through the support of Western nations like France and has
thrived due to a cynical attitude toward nonproliferation that has
made the world more dangerous. _

Israeli tanks on Israeli Border, Guardian CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Israel’s nuclear weapons program has been an open secret for over
fifty years. Declassified documents and the wider availability of
satellite imagery has largely been responsible for revealing the
extent of the nation’s nuclear program. So too has the courage of
whistleblowers such as Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli nuclear technician
who exposed his country’s covert program and was subsequently
drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents in Italy before being secretly
tried and sentenced to eighteen years in prison in 1986.

 

Yet the United States and other nuclear-armed states, as well as a
broad range of bodies responsible for monitoring arms proliferation,
continue to maintain a policy of not publicly acknowledging the
existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons.

These norms of institutional secrecy are surprisingly powerful and
far-reaching. US government employees have been fired
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referring to Israeli nuclear weapons. Even Wikipedia’s page
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subject uses circuitous language to refer to their existence. (The
page is locked to edits from almost all contributors.) This approach
is effective: a 2021 poll suggested
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more Americans believed that Iran has nuclear weapons than that Israel
does, when the reality is the opposite.

This wall of silence has proven remarkably porous. During the early
days of Israel’s war on Gaza, government officials openly
entertained
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possibility of using nuclear weapons on the battlefield, and figures
within the US military think tank circuit have wondered whether
Israel’s secrecy
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doing it more harm than good.

Conventional wisdom about the strategic importance of possessing
nuclear weapons is that there’s no reason to have one if you don’t
tell anyone. Intimidation is as much a part of deterrence as use. If
no one suspects you can respond to an attack with the overwhelming
force of a nuclear counterattack, what’s to make them think twice?

But Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel, which has thus
far led to the evacuation of over ninety thousand people
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gives lie to the notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers
complete protection. In a recent speech, Hassan Nasrallah,
Hezbollah’s secretary general, made it clear that if Israel were to
cross what it considers to be red lines, there would be no target
within the country safe from a retaliatory response. It is therefore
not clear that Israel’s nuclear weapons are on their own preventing
it from being attacked in a way that threatens its existence.
Israel’s relationship with the United States has, however, afforded
it a range of impressive offensive and defensive nonnuclear
capabilities, backed up by the even larger looming threat of US
military involvement, which it is actively using.

Were the US to enforce its own policies consistently, Israel’s
status as a state in possession of nuclear weapons would directly
threaten its access to aid. The Glenn Amendment
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the US Arms Export Control Act explicitly prohibits arms assistance to
and mandates sanctions on countries that have, as Israel did in 1979,
tested a nuclear weapon after 1977. But the fact that its nuclear
weapons program continues to command this kind of bizarre deference
illuminates the forces driving nuclear proliferation around the world.

The Forces Behind Proliferation

Scrupulous nonacknowledgment of Israeli nuclear weapons in the present
day is part of the United States’ general position of aiding Israeli
military endeavors, regardless of the financial or strategic cost. But
the reason Israel has nuclear weapons in the first place has less to
do with its relationship with the United States and more to do with
the geopolitical forces that have driven proliferation since America
first dropped the bomb on Japan.

 

The program that produced Israel’s nuclear weapons is as old as the
state itself. As Avner Cohen details in _Israel and the Bomb_, a
nuclear program was discussed by Israel’s leaders practically from
the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, the
country’s first prime minister, took an intense personal interest in
nuclear technologies in particular and science and technology as
foundations of modern state power in general.

Hezbollah’s continued assault on northern Israel gives lie to the
notion that possession of nuclear weapons offers complete protection.

Already in 1949, Israel was conducting exploratory research for
potential uranium deposits in the Negev, a desert region in the
country’s south. When these proved inadequate, it developed
techniques for producing usable nuclear material from the relatively
poor resources at its disposal, before turning to the United States as
the potential source of the raw materials necessary to jump-start a
nuclear program.

But in the immediate postwar years, the United States was unwilling to
provide the necessary material without guarantees from Israel that the
country’s leaders saw as undesirably inhibiting. Israel instead
turned to other small countries with nuclear programs at different
stages of development: France and Norway, two of only three European
countries in the early 1950s operating nuclear reactors.

Israel and France shared a set of geopolitical interests. Both opposed
the government of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. The French,
motivated by neocolonial idealism, took issue with Nasser for
nationalizing the Suez Canal, and Israel of course felt threatened by
Nasser’s Arab nationalism.

Skepticism about the possibility that the US nuclear umbrella could
actually offer security guarantees also motivated nations like France
to advance a Gaullist policy of strategic autonomy. This meant
encouraging nuclear proliferation where doing so would secure the
broader geopolitical interests of declining powers.

Nonproliferation Amid Great-Power Rivalry

In the present, the United States actively works to shield the Israeli
nuclear weapons program from criticism as well as public knowledge. As
with France’s hostility to a Nasser-led anti-Western order, the
Israeli-US alliance is strongly motivated by fear of Iran, or any
other anti-American state, developing its own nuclear program. Yet
Israel’s nuclear weapons, along with the substantial, long-term
support among a certain segment of the US political class for war with
Iran, are two very powerful factors driving Iran to develop its own
nuclear weapon.

At present, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, though
experts believe
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it currently maintains the capability to quickly develop them.
President Barack Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal limited Iran’s
ability to develop a nuclear weapon and imposed a regime of
inspections and oversight which provided assurance to other countries
that it was not developing nuclear weapons. But Israel opposed the
deal on the grounds that it did not go far enough to preclude the
possibility that Iran might one day develop a nuclear weapon — a
similar kind of all-or-nothing approach to the one that informed the
Donald Trump administration’s decision to exit the agreement in
2018.

 

As Israel’s war on Gaza continues and expands outward into the
broader region, it seems it may only be a matter of time before Iran
finally does develop a nuclear weapon. After its recent large-scale
rocket attacks against Israel, Iran announced that it might reverse
its current voluntary commitment to not developing nuclear weapons
should Israel retaliate by hitting its nuclear facilities. It goes
without saying that this would make the ongoing conflict between
Israel and Iran much more dangerous, giving even low-level incidents
the potential to escalate to dramatic and destructive new heights.

The United States actively works to shield the Israeli nuclear weapons
program from criticism as well as public knowledge.

In effect, unwillingness to commit to nuclear nonproliferation has led
to nuclear proliferation. This explains why Saudi Arabia has in recent
years betrayed nuclear ambitions. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has
stated in US press outlets that Saudi Arabia would develop a nuclear
weapon if Iran did so. Yet rather than treating this open disregard
for stated US policy as a serious limit on US-Saudi relations, the
United States has been pushing for a so-called “normalization”
deal between Saudi Arabia and Israel — including a stipulation
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a “credible path to a Palestinian state.” Saudi Arabia, in turn,
wants the United States to provide it with nuclear technology —
ostensibly, of course, for a power program.

The dilemma for America is that whatever interest it does have in
nuclear nonproliferation must be balanced against its broader
commitment to global hegemony. The latter would be undermined if
China, which it now sees as its key competitor, stepped in to provide
technical support to fledgling nuclear programs, as it has done with
Saudi Arabia. Last year, China sent one of its engineering companies
to conduct surveys of the Gulf monarchy’s uranium deposits, although
it seems unlikely that these deposits could support a nuclear program
of any size.

Nuclear weapons experts have called for safeguards that could prevent
the development of a Saudi nuclear weapons program. Yet unlike in the
case of Israel’s search for nuclear material, the threat of
safeguards doesn’t seem to be a deterrent to the kingdom’s openly
stated nuclear ambitions. It sometimes seems that U.S. nuclear weapons
policy in 2024 is based on a tacit acceptance of its powerlessness
over global nuclear weapons politics. Rather than trying to prevent
proliferation, America has been forced to settle for the role of being
the primary nuclear patron where it can.

Existential Threats

Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons has been largely irrelevant
to the ongoing war in Gaza. The country’s overwhelming conventional
capabilities have granted it superiority on the battlefield, at the
cost of the lives of tens of thousands of civilians. But possession of
nuclear weapons reinforces the worldview that underlies Israel’s
political calculations (and to some extent, those of every
nuclear-armed country): that its existence is constantly threatened,
and it is only rational for it to possess the means of responding to
such threats with unlimited force.

 

It is the states with the most nuclear weapons, Russia and the United
States, that most assiduously cling to the logic that weapons of mass
destruction are the only safeguard against existential threats. Both
have consistently bypassed opportunities to deescalate the very real,
immediate risks to human safety and civilization that the continued
existence of nuclear weapons poses. In doing so, they’ve set a
powerful precedent for every other country in the world to uphold
nuclear weapons as the only real guarantor of security.

Without a real commitment to reducing the role of nuclear weapons in
global politics by the states that can certainly afford it, this de
facto policy encourages nuclear proliferation. Israel’s
well-defended status as a nuclear power that need not even announce
itself is not an exception, but an example to other states thinking of
going nuclear.

_EMMA CLAIRE FOLEY is a writer and filmmaker based in New York. Her
writing and commentary has appeared in Newsweek, NBC, the Guardian,
and elsewhere._

_If you like this article, please subscribe
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* Israel
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* Palestine
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* nuclear weapons
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* Iran nuclear deal
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* international relations
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