Israel is thought to have about eighty nuclear warheads. The exact number is not known because Israel has never explicitly admitted having nuclear weapons. They even tested a nuclear device about fifty years ago. The other nuclear powers in the world have not been very vocal about the Israeli nuclear program. Israel has never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NNPT).
The Israeli nuclear weapons program was revealed to the British press by Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. Vanunu was an Israeli nuclear technician who was opposed to weapons of mass destruction and was driven by his conscience to make the Israeli program public. The Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, lured him from Britain to Italy, drugged him and brought him back to Israel to stand trial. He served eighteen years in prison, spending eleven of those years in solitary confinement.
France decided in 1954 that it needed to have nuclear weapons in order to be taken seriously as a world power. They moved aggressively into nuclear weapons research. They were sympathetic to Israel and they wanted to expand their exports so they sold nuclear technology to Israel as well as other non-nuclear countries. They helped the Israelis build a nuclear reactor at Dimona as well as a secret reprocessing plant to create weapons grade plutonium.
Although Israel did not sign the NNPT, they did sign international treaties against nuclear testing which they violated. They are also accused of violating numerous national and international laws with respect to trade and transport in nuclear technology and materials. Among the other nations who have shared nuclear technology and/or nuclear materials with Israel are the United States, Germany, Britain and Norway. In 1959, Israel purchased twenty tons of heavy water to use in their nuclear reactor from Britain and Norway. The British and Norwegian authorities knew that the heavy water could be used to help create nuclear weapons but decided to let the sale go through anyway.
The Israelis refused to let the International Atomic Energy Agency visit the Dimona site. They did allow U.S. inspectors after demands from U.S. President Kennedy in the early 1960s, but they went to great lengths to prevent U.S. access to their secret plutonium recovery plant. The CIA told U.S. President Johnson that the Israelis had nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them in 1968. The Johnson administration and subsequent Presidents decided to keep the Israel nuclear arsenal a secret. In 1979, a U.S. spy satellite saw flashes of a nuclear detonation in the Indian Ocean that were later identified as an Israeli weapon test.
In addition to the willing cooperation of other countries, Israel fielded a sophisticated and very successful spy network named Lakam to gather information on nuclear technology from other nuclear countries. Lakam bought nuclear triggers on the black market, copied blueprints of nuclear technology in other countries, purchased tons of yellow cake uranium through a network of front companies and even clandestinely transferred an entire shipload of yellow cake to Israeli vessels after concealing their purchase through front companies in other countries. Lakam also stole some fissile materials from a U.S. company.
In December of 2013, the former speaker of the Israeli Knesset, Avraham Burg, stated publicly that Israel had nuclear and chemical weapons and said that the non-disclosure policy of the Israeli government was "outdated and childish." A right-wing political group in Israel demanded that Burg be investigated for committing treason. When U.S. President Obama was asked directly about Israeli nuclear weapons in early 2009, he sidestepped the question by saying that he did not want to "speculate." A member of the U.K. Parliament, Baroness Warsi, was asked about the Israeli program in November of 2013. She would only say that the U.K and Israel regularly conferred on nuclear issues and that the U.K. had urged Israel to sign the NNPT.
Amidst the furor over a possible Iranian nuclear bomb, there have been complaints by Middle Eastern countries over the latitude and support given to Israel in its nuclear weapons program by other nuclear nations.
Mordechai Vanunu:
