Israeli nuclear capabilities in mid-1967: what Washington knew (and didn’t know)

Abstract

ABSTRACTAt the time of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, top US policy makers did not believe that Israel had produced nuclear weapons. Since the discovery of the Dimona reactor complex in 1960, senior US officials and intelligence experts took it for granted that the Israelis sought a nuclear-weapon capability, but a wall of secrecy surrounded the reactor. Even inspection visits by US nuclear experts left important questions unanswered. A central problem was whether Israel had acquired or would acquire the reprocessing plant needed to produce plutonium. While the original plans for Dimona included an underground reprocessing plant, it was deeply secret. A few months before the war, State Department intelligence experts suspected that the Israelis had begun reprocessing and could even have stockpiled a few devices, but this perception was not shared at the top. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration would have been profoundly shocked if US intelligence had discovered the secret assembly of nuclear devices in May 1967. Strict secrecy in Israel may have averted a crisis in US–Israeli relations.