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Israel's nuclear weapons [1]

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Date: 2025-06-23

Why Trump Bombed Iran: Preserving US and Israeli Nuclear Supremacy in the Middle East, by Dan Steinbock of Finland, was posted June 22 in Informed Comment, the blog of University of Michigan Professor Juan Cole. The article begins with this:

As President Trump ordered the US to attack three major Iranian nuclear sites, a misguided concept of Israel’s national security morphed into an even more twisted view of US national security. Only days ago, President Trump reiterated that Iran will never have nuclear weapons. Yet, according to US intelligence assessments, Iran was up to three years away from being able to produce and deliver a nuclear weapon. While Israel built its case for war, the US didn’t buy it. The problem is that Trump did.

Steinbock continues to describe the development of nuclear weapons by Iran and especially Israel. He points out that Iran is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and Israel is not. He delves into Israeli history:

Israel first crossed the nuclear threshold on the eve of the Six-Day War in May 1967, when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol secretly ordered the nuclear reactor scientists in Dimona to assemble two crude nuclear devices. The crude atomic bombs “were readied for deployment on trucks that could race to the Egyptian border for detonation in the event Arab forces overwhelmed Israeli defenses.”

Steinbock says that “the conventional estimate” is that Israel has about 90 nuclear warheads, which makes it “the world’s 9th largest nuclear power,” with “a broad range of nuclear weapons.” On the other hand, “Iran may have enriched enough nuclear material” to build nuclear weapons but “is thought not to have done so.” Steinbock adds: “Officially, Israel has a long-standing policy of nuclear ambiguity. It neither officially confirms nor denies that it possesses nuclear weapons.”

He then provides more details about Israel’s nuclear arms development in 1973:

In October 1973, amid the Egyptian-Syrian invasion, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan mobilized nuclear warheads for possible use, which led to president Nixon’s massive rearmament drive and the rapid deepening of the bilateral military ties – and eventually the symbiotic relationship that President Trump touted in his Sunday White House commentary, right after the US attacks against Iran’s nuclear enclaves.

Continuing to discuss Israeli nuclear history, Steinbock writes:

In 1981, Israel destroyed Iraq’s nuclear reactor Osirak as the Begin government initiated its war on Lebanon. The Osirak attack gave rise to “the Begin nuclear doctrine, which allows no “hostile” regional state to possess nuclear military capability. Begin described the strike as an act of “anticipatory self-defense at its best,” saying “We shall not allow any enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction turned against us.”

Later, according to Steinbock, there were “targeted killings of Iranian nuclear scientists,” particularly since 2010.

Steinbock says a month after the Hamas offensive of October 7, 2023, Israeli minister Amichai Eliyahu suggested that one of Israel’s options in the war against Hamas was to drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. It was “quickly disavowed” by Netanyahu, but he didn’t fire the minister.

In a way, Eliyahu got what he wished for. By late April 2024, Israel had dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs over Gaza, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. That amounts to more than 30 kilograms of explosives per individual on mainly women and children.

Steinbock says “the weight of the U.S. nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan was estimated at about 15,000 tons of explosives.” He adds:

Even before the Rafah offensive in May 2024, Gaza had been bombed almost five times more than that.

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UPDATE:

The Washington Post on June 23 shows How Israel deceived the United States about its nuclear weapons program

As of 2021, Israel was believed to possess 90 nuclear warheads for delivery by aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles and possibly sea-based cruise missiles, according to an estimate by researchers at the Federation of American Scientists.

The Post article includes details from Seymour Hersh’s 1991 book The Samson Option:

A false control room was constructed at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation. There were extensive practice sessions in the fake control room, as Israeli technicians sought to avoid any slips when the Americans arrived. The goal was to convince the inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible.

The Post says that by 1968 ”the CIA was convinced Israel had nuclear weapons — just as negotiations on the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) were completed and the treaty designed to thwart the spread of nuclear weapons was opened for signature by members of the United Nations.” However, U.S. officials concluded it was too late “to make Israel abandon its nuclear capability.”

In a private one-on-one White House meeting on Sept. 26, 1969, then-President Richard M. Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir cut a secret deal: Israel would not test its weapons or acknowledge them, and in return the United States would end its Dimona visits and stop pressuring Israel to sign the NPT. A memo from then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger indicates Nixon pressed Meir not to visibly introduce nuclear weapons in the region.

The Post explains: “Israel misled the United States about its nuclear ambitions, believing that an atomic bomb would be an insurance policy against overwhelming force by its hostile neighbors.”

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UPDATE 2: a commenter adds this from today’s WaPo:

How Israel deceived the United States about its nuclear weapons program Israel is attacking Iran’s nuclear sites, but Tehran’s secret path was blazed by the Israelis. But this history lesson is not about Iran’s program. It’s about Israel’s nuclear program — and how Jerusalem, too, deceived American officials about its intentions. If Iran has followed a playbook of nuclear deception, it was written by Israel. When French officials began to have second thoughts about the project and pressed Israel to stop work, Israel proposed a compromise: France would help finish the job and not insist on international inspections in return for Israeli assurances that they had no intention of making nuclear weapons. When U.S. intelligence discovered the secret facility deep in the desert late in the 1950s, Israeli officials lied to the American Embassy and said it was only a textile plant. When that turned out to be false, Israeli officials offered another explanation: It was purely a metallurgical research installation that did not contain the chemical reprocessing plant needed to produce nuclear weapons. Yet U.S. officials wanted regular inspections so they could assure Arab nations, especially Egypt, that Israel did not have a secret bomb program. But the inspectors were operating under a false assumption — that Israel had no plutonium reprocessing plant. In reality, one was built beneath the reactor. Israelis had built fake walls around the elevators that led to it.

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Dan Steinbock, the author of Why Trump Bombed Iran: Preserving US and Israeli Nuclear Supremacy in the Middle East, was born in Helsinki in 1954. He is an economic researcher, writer, and the author of The Fall of Israel. The founder of Difference Group, Steinbock has served at the India, China and America Institute (US), Shanghai Institute for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore).

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