Nuclear weapons and Israel
Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. Estimates of Israel's stockpile range from 90 to 400 warheads, and the country is believed to possess a nuclear triad of delivery options: by F-15 and F-16 fighters, by Dolphin-class submarine-launched cruise missiles, and by the Jericho series of medium to intercontinental range ballistic missiles. Its first deliverable nuclear weapon is estimated to have been completed in late 1966 or early 1967, which would have made it the sixth of nine nuclear-armed countries.
Israel maintains a policy of deliberate ambiguity, neither formally denying nor admitting to having nuclear weapons, instead repeating over the years that "Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East". Israel interprets "introduce" to mean it will not test or formally acknowledge its nuclear arsenal. Western governments, including the United States, similarly do not acknowledge the Israeli capacity. Israeli officials, including prime ministers, have made statements that seemed to imply that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, including discussions of use in the Gaza war.
Israel has not signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, despite United Nations General Assembly pressure to do so. It argues that nuclear controls cannot be implemented in isolation of other security issues and that only following the establishment of peaceful relations of all countries in the region could controls be introduced via negotiation of "a mutually and effectively verifiable regime that establish the Middle East as a zone free of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, as well as ballistic missiles."
Israel subscribes to the Begin Doctrine of counter-proliferation, including preventive strikes, which seeks to prevent other regional actors from acquiring nuclear weapons. The Israeli Air Force conducted Operation Opera and Operation Orchard, which destroyed pre-critical Iraqi and Syrian nuclear reactors in 1981 and 2007, respectively. Israel had also extensively targeted Iran's nuclear program, using malware, assassinations, and airstrikes during their 2025 war. The Samson Option refers to Israel's ability to use nuclear weapons against attackers as a deterrence strategy in the face of existential military threats to the nation.
Israel began to investigate nuclear-related science soon after it declared independence in 1948, and, with French cooperation, secretly began building the Negev Nuclear Research Center, a facility near Dimona housing a nuclear reactor and reprocessing plant in the late 1950s. During the Six-Day War, Israel aborted a plan to demonstrate a nuclear weapon in the occupied Sinai. There is some evidence Israel increased its nuclear readiness during the Yom Kippur War and the Gulf War. The 1979 Vela incident is widely suspected to have been an Israeli nuclear test, in collaboration with South Africa. The first extensive media coverage came via the 1986 revelations of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Dimona technician. Vanunu was soon kidnapped by Mossad, brought back to Israel, and imprisoned for 18 years for treason and espionage. Israel is also suspected to possess offensive chemical and biological weapons.
Development history
Before Dimona, 1949–1956
Israel's first prime minister David Ben-Gurion was "nearly obsessed" with obtaining nuclear weapons to prevent the Holocaust from reoccurring. He stated, "What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people." Ben-Gurion decided to recruit Jewish scientists from abroad even before the end of the 1948 Arab–Israeli War that established Israel's independence. He and others, such as head of the Weizmann Institute of Science and defense ministry scientist Ernst David Bergmann, believed and hoped that Jewish scientists such as Oppenheimer and Teller would help Israel.In 1949 a unit of the Israel Defense Forces Science Corps, known by the Hebrew acronym HEMED GIMMEL, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev. While a preliminary study was initially prompted by rumors of petroleum fields, one objective of the longer two year survey was to find sources of uranium; some small recoverable amounts were found in phosphate deposits. That year Hemed Gimmel funded six Israeli physics graduate students to study overseas, including one to go to the University of Chicago and study under Enrico Fermi, who had overseen the world's first artificial and self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction. In early 1952 Hemed Gimmel was moved from the IDF to the Ministry of Defense and was reorganized as the Division of Research and Infrastructure. That June, Bergmann was appointed by Ben-Gurion to be the first chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission.
Hemed Gimmel was renamed Machon 4 during the transfer, and was used by Bergmann as the "chief laboratory" of the IAEC; by 1953, Machon 4, working with the Department of Isotope Research at the Weizmann Institute, developed the capability to extract uranium from the phosphate in the Negev and a new technique to produce indigenous heavy water. The techniques were two years more advanced than American efforts. Bergmann, who was interested in increasing nuclear cooperation with the French, sold both patents to the Commissariat à l'énergie atomique for 60 million francs. Although they were never commercialized, it was a consequential step for future French-Israeli cooperation.
In addition, Israeli scientists probably helped construct the G-1 plutonium production reactor and UP-1 reprocessing plant at Marcoule. France and Israel had close relations in many areas. France was principal arms supplier for the new Jewish state, and as instability spread through French colonies in North Africa, Israel provided valuable intelligence obtained from contacts with Sephardi Jews in those countries. At the same time, Israeli scientists were also observing France's own nuclear program and were the only foreign scientists allowed to roam "at will" at the nuclear facility at Marcoule. In addition to the relationships between Israeli and French Jewish and non-Jewish researchers, the French believed that cooperation with Israel could give them access to international Jewish nuclear scientists.
After U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower announced the Atoms for Peace initiative, Israel became the second country to sign on, and signed a peaceful nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States on July 12, 1955. This culminated in a public signing ceremony on March 20, 1957, to construct a "small swimming-pool research reactor in Nachal Soreq", which would be used to shroud the construction of a much larger facility with the French at Dimona.
In 1986 Francis Perrin, French high-commissioner for atomic energy from 1951 to 1970 stated publicly that in 1949 Israeli scientists were invited to the Saclay Nuclear Research Centre, this cooperation leading to a joint effort including sharing of knowledge between French and Israeli scientists especially those with knowledge from the Manhattan Project. According to Lieutenant Colonel Warner D. Farr in a report to the USAF Counterproliferation Center while France was previously a leader in nuclear research "Israel and France were at a similar level of expertise after the war, and Israeli scientists could make significant contributions to the French effort. Progress in nuclear science and technology in France and Israel remained closely linked throughout the early fifties." Furthermore, according to Farr, "There were several Israeli observers at the French nuclear tests and the Israelis had 'unrestricted access to French nuclear test explosion data.'"
Dimona, 1956–1965
Negotiation
The French justified their decision to provide Israel a nuclear reactor by claiming it was not without precedent. In September 1955 Canada publicly announced that it would help the Indian government build a heavy-water research reactor, the CIRUS reactor, for "peaceful purposes". When Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, France proposed Israel attack Egypt and invade the Sinai as a pretext for France and Britain to invade Egypt posing as "peacekeepers" with the true intent of seizing the Suez Canal. In exchange, France would provide the nuclear reactor as the basis for the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Shimon Peres, sensing the opportunity on the nuclear reactor, accepted. On September 17, 1956, Peres and Bergmann reached a tentative agreement in Paris for the CEA to sell Israel a small research reactor. This was reaffirmed by Peres at the Protocol of Sèvres conference in late October for the sale of a reactor to be built near Dimona and for a supply of uranium fuel.Israel benefited from an unusually pro-Israel French government during this time. After the Suez Crisis led to the threat of Soviet intervention and the British and French were being forced to withdraw under pressure from the U.S., Ben-Gurion sent Peres and Golda Meir to France. During their discussions, the groundwork was laid for France to build a larger nuclear reactor and chemical reprocessing plant, and Prime Minister Guy Mollet, ashamed at having abandoned his commitment to fellow socialists in Israel, supposedly told an aide, "I owe the bomb to them," while General Paul Ely, Chief of the Defence Staff, said, "We must give them this to guarantee their security, it is vital." Mollet's successor Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury stated, "I gave you the bomb in order to prevent another Holocaust from befalling the Jewish people and so that Israel could face its enemies in the Middle East."
The French–Israeli relationship was finalized on October 3, 1957, in two agreements the contents of which remain secret: One political, that declared the project to be for peaceful purposes and specified other legal obligations, and one technical that described a 24 megawatt EL-102 reactor. The one to actually be built was to be two to three times as large and be able to produce 22 kilograms of plutonium a year. When the reactor arrived in Israel, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared that its purpose was to provide a pumping station to desalinate a billion gallons of seawater annually and turn the desert into an "agricultural paradise". Six of seven members of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission promptly resigned, protesting that the reactor was the precursor to "political adventurism which will unite the world against us".