After Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, Israel attacked Iran to dismantle its nuclear program. For the last 44 years, Israel has been fulfilling the promise it made under the Begin Doctrine, to launch preemptive military strikes to ensure that no hostile state in the Middle East develops nuclear weapons.
Named after Prime Minister Menachem Begin, this doctrine was established following Israel’s 1981 airstrike on Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor (Operation Opera). The doctrine was reaffirmed in 2007 with Operation Orchard, which destroyed a Syrian nuclear reactor.
Under the same doctrine, Israel launched cyberattacks like Stuxnet on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010, and has now launched targeted air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
The last four-and-a-half decades show Israel’s commitment to preventing any Middle Eastern state from becoming a nuclear power.
However, there is one state in the Middle East that has been a secret nuclear power for the last five decades—Israel itself.
According to the SIPRI Yearbook 2025, Israel has a stockpile of 90 nuclear bombs.
How Israel built this massive stockpile of nuclear warheads under the radar is a story worth a Hollywood flick.
And, if such a movie is to be made, there is no better guy to produce it than Arnon Milchan, a successful Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Fight Club, The Revenant, and 12 Years a Slave.
Why? Because Milchan himself worked as Israel’s and Mossad’s mole in Hollywood, using his connections in LA to procure nuclear technology and Uranium for Israel’s nuclear program.
The story of Israel building its nuclear weapons is the story of determination, audacity, trickery, and deception, all rolled into a nation’s will to survive against all odds.
How Israel Got Its Nuclear Weapons
Israel’s nuclear aspirations began as soon as the country was founded in 1948. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, believed nuclear capability was essential for survival.
In his new book, The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain With the Bomb, Avner Cohen, the preeminent historian of Israel’s nuclear program, writes that David Ben-Gurion was nearly obsessed with developing nuclear weapons as the only guarantor against further slaughter.
“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 declared.
In the late 1940s, Israeli scientists, many trained in Europe and the US, began researching nuclear technology. The Israeli Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) was established in 1952 to oversee these efforts. Initially, Israel lacked the infrastructure, technology, and materials for a nuclear program, prompting a strategy of international collaboration and covert acquisition.
In 1957, Israel struck a pivotal deal with France, which agreed to supply a 24-megawatt research reactor and technical expertise for the Dimona facility in the Negev Desert. The agreement, detailed in Seymour Hersh’s The Samson Option (1991), was kept secret, even from the US, Israel’s steadfast ally.
Why France, a country that took one of the harshest lines on nuclear proliferation when it came to Iran, helped Israel is not difficult to understand.
Cohen writes in his book that France felt a deep sense of responsibility towards Israel for its help during the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Besides, Israel was the primary source of intelligence for France to safeguard its colonies in North Africa.
France also provided designs for plutonium reprocessing, critical for weaponizing nuclear material. This partnership laid the foundation for Israel’s program but required additional resources, specifically uranium and technical expertise.
Israel would acquire these through less conventional means.
Stolen Designs And Espionage (1950s–1960s)
However, when Charles de Gaulle became President of France in late 1958, he sought to end French–Israeli nuclear cooperation. He said that he would not supply Israel with uranium unless the plant was opened to international inspectors.
To advance the program, Israel relied on espionage. Israel used a network of Jewish scientists in Europe and the US to gain access to classified nuclear technology.
Hersh’s The Samson Option suggests Israeli agents may have accessed classified data from American nuclear facilities through Jewish-American scientists sympathetic to Israel’s cause. These efforts supplemented French designs, enabling Israel to refine its weapons technology.
Stolen Uranium And Front Companies (1960s)
Israel, however, still suffered from a critical handicap. Uranium, the lifeblood of nuclear weapons, was scarce in Israel.
To secure it, Israel turned to covert operations. The most infamous case occurred in the mid-1960s, when approximately 200–600 pounds of highly enriched uranium vanished from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
On July 19, 1969, US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger wrote the following about Israel’s nuclear weapons program: “There is circumstantial evidence that some fissionable material available for Israel’s weapons development was illegally obtained from the United States by about 1965.”
Declassified FBI and CIA documents, referenced in a 2014 report by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, strongly suggest that the uranium was diverted to Israel, possibly with the complicity of NUMEC’s owner, Zalman Shapiro, an open Zionist sympathizer. The operation remains one of the most significant breaches of US nuclear security.
Israel also established front companies to procure sensitive materials. According to Victor Gilinsky’s 2004 article in The Nonproliferation Review, firms like the Israel-based Materials and Equipment Export Corporation funneled uranium and other dual-use technologies from Europe and the US to Dimona. These companies operated under the guise of civilian industries, evading export controls and international scrutiny.
An Entire Freighter Full Of Uranium Disappears
To secure uranium for Israel, in 1968, Mossad organized the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. Known as the Plumbat affair, Mossad utilized a web of front companies to purchase a consignment of uranium oxide, commonly referred to as yellowcake, in Antwerp.
The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled “plumbat”, a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies.
When the ship docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold, and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean, where, under Israeli guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.
Israel also managed to buy yellowcake from Argentina and the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Israel also needed deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, for its nuclear reactors. Israel turned to the UK and Norway for this. Norway has sold the UK 20 tons of heavy water, but some of it was surplus.
Israel managed to buy it from the UK despite suspicions that the material would be used to make weapons.
A Secret Within A Secret
By 1964, the Dimona reactor had become operational, producing plutonium for use in weapons. However, by now, the US was also aware of the Dimona facility and insisted on inspections.
The building housed a highly classified underground facility for plutonium separation. It seems that even within Israeli government circles, very few people were aware of its existence.
In the 1960s, US teams visited this site at least three times. Yet all reports of the US visits in this period claimed they found no direct or indirect discernible evidence of weapons-related activities.
It is incredible how Israelis fooled Americans, even when they were inspecting the site at regular intervals.
By 1967, it is estimated that Israel had its first nuclear weapon ready.
In the 1970s, Mossad’s clandestine activities in the US continued. Milchan was recruited in 1965 by Israel’s current president, Shimon Peres. Milchan was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily “mislaying” in his kitchen.
These same centrifuge blueprints were stolen once again by AQ Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb. He later smuggled these designs to Libya, North Korea, and Iran.
Ironically, both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs were built on the same stolen centrifuge blueprints. It is this convergence in centrifuge designs that allowed Israel to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, for launching a cyber attack on the Iranian nuclear program in 2010.
However, that cyberattack only set the clock backward by a few years, forcing Israel to launch air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025.
- Sumit Ahlawat has over a decade of experience in news media. He has worked with Press Trust of India, Times Now, Zee News, Economic Times, and Microsoft News. He holds a Master’s Degree in International Media and Modern History from the University of Sheffield, UK.
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- He can be reached at ahlawat.sumit85 (at) gmail.com
