Tuesday, 17 December 2024 — National Security Archive
“We Are Not a Satellite of America”: Ben-Gurion’s Angry Response to U.S. Questions about the Dimona Reactor
Declassified Reports on U.S. Inspections of Dimona in 1965, 1966 and 1967
1967 Intelligence Report: Was Israel Producing Weapons-Grade Plutonium and Deceiving the U.S.?
Years Later, Moscow Asked: Does Israel Have the Bomb?
Washington, D.C., December 17, 2024 – A recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to correctly and unequivocally state that Israel’s Dimona nuclear project, which the U.S. had recently discovered, would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related. All known, subsequent U.S. intelligence analyses of Israel’s nuclear program treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s when the U.S. and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear weapons state.
The newly released intelligence report, published here for the first time, is one of 20 declassified documents featured in a new National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book. It is the latest in a series of declassified document collections edited by Archive senior analyst William Burr and Professor Avner Cohen (Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey) concerning U.S. policy toward the Israeli nuclear weapons program and the complex problems that it raised for U.S. diplomacy during the 1960s and 1970s.
An equally intriguing, declassified U.S. intelligence analysis revealed that several Israeli sources had informed the U.S. embassy in February 1967 that Israel “either has or is about to complete” a reprocessing plant at Dimona and that “the Dimona reactor has been operated at full capacity.” The bottom line was that Israel was “6-8 weeks” from the bomb. This is the first known document that treated it as possible that Israel was systematically deceiving the United States about Dimona.
Newly released documents from the 1970s illustrate how the U.S. government accommodated itself to Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities. These include the text of U.S. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s “non-paper,” handed to Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in early 1978, affirming that the U.S. “accept[s] [Israel’s] assurances” that it did not possess nuclear weapons and that it would “not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the Middle East.” A contemporaneous State Department report on nuclear proliferation risks suggested why Washington had abandoned pressure on Israel to sign the Nonproliferation Treaty: “The high US priority in finding a peace settlement in the area is overriding and inhibits effective pursuit of non-proliferation objectives in Israel.”
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.
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