According to our elected leaders, we should be very scared of the possibility that Iran could get a nuclear bomb. But Israel already has the
According to estimates by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, published recently in the New York Times, Israel has āat least 90 [nuclear] warheads and enough fissile material to produce up to hundreds more.ā President Jimmy Carter, who was in a position to know, said in 2014 that he believed the number is closer to ā300 or more, nobody knows exactly how many.ā In either case, this is more nukes than another country weāre routinely told to be terrified of: North Korea, which the Center estimates possesses ā20 to 30āÆ possibly assembled warheads.ā These Israeli warheads can be delivered in a variety of ways, including by U.S.-made fighter jets, by German-made āDolphinā submarines, and by a variety of missilesāincluding the Jericho 3, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that came online in 2011. Describing the early tests of this missile, Isaac Ben-Israelāwho was both a scientist, a retired IDF general, and a member of the Knesset at the timeāsaid in 2008 that āeverybody can do the math and understandā¦ that we can reach with a rocket engine to every point in the world.ā If thatās not a thinly veiled threat, nothing is.Ā Of course, we donāt know exactly how many nuclear warheads Israel has, because Israeli leaders refuse to publicly admit they have any. The whole military program is kept in near-total secrecy, under a policy called āstrategic ambiguity,ā meaning the existence of the bombs is neither confirmed nor denied. Historians believe Israel first got a nuclear weapon in 1967, after secretly refining plutonium at the Dimona facility and running a āfull deception campaignā to convince U.S. inspectors the purpose of the reactors there was civilian rather than military. (Ironically, this is exactly the kind of deception Israel now accuses Iran of practicing.) Itās also strongly suspected that Israel tested a nuclear weapon off the coast of South Africa in 1979, in partnership with that countryās apartheid government. Itās called the VelaĀ incident, after the spy satellite that spotted the nuclear flash. But āstrategic ambiguityā means thereās little international oversight or accountability involved with any of this, and much of it takes place in violation of international law. Like North Korea and a small handful of other nations, Israel has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), despite United Nations resolutions that it should do so. It has signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, but likely broke it with the South African incident. And most importantly, its leaders refuse to allow inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to access Dimona, so we have no way of knowing whatās going on in there.Ā Under U.S. law, Israelās rogue nuclear program means that the United States should not be supplying it with military aid of any kind. The law in question is the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, and its language is unambiguous. But for more than 50 years now, U.S. leaders have been willing to ignore their own laws and accept this uneasy state of affairs. A 1993 report by the congressional Office of Technology Assessment, titled āProliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction: Assessing the Risks,ā sums up the rationale well: āwould the United States be willing to sacrifice its relationship with Israelāand possibly risk Israeli national survivalāto pressure that state to give up a nuclear arsenal it believes essential to its security?ā For successive administrations, the answer has been no.
20 June 2025
