Israel maintains its policy of nuclear ambiguity

It is ironic that two nuclear weapons powers, the US and Israel, attacked non-nuclear Iran’s research sites and put them out of action for months or years. While Donald Trump has repeatedly said Iran cannot be permitted to obtain a nuclear weapon, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin said its June 12-day war on Iran was meant to stop it from making nuclear weapons. Iran has denied it seeks to produce nuclear arms and argues its nuclear programme is solely for peaceful civilian purposes.

Iran has no bombs and is a member of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The US, which has 5,500 nuclear warheads, is among the states recognised as possessing nuclear bombs along with France, Britain, Russia, and China. Pakistan, India, and North Korea also have bombs while non-NPT member Israel does not admit to having at least 90 nuclear devices plus between 750 and 1,110 kilograms of plutonium, which would be enough to build 187 to 277 nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, Israel relies on a policy of ambiguity to avoid criticism or sanctions.

Iran has submitted to NPT controls and inspections and had abided by the 2015 agreement with the US, France, Britain, Germany, Russia and China until 2018 when Trump took the US out of the deal and imposed punitive sanctions, crippling Iran’s economy. In 2019, Iran began to breach the terms of the deal by enriching uranium to 60 per cent (a provocative gesture) instead of sticking to the 3.67 per cent permitted, amassing a large stockpile, and curbing UN nuclear watchdog (IAEA) inspections.

Israeli ambiguity over its nuclear bomb programme and arsenal has been exposed as pointless by a number of international and Israeli writers and experts. France played a key role in the creation in the late 1950’s of Israel’s nuclear programme by helping to build Israel’s main reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert where plutonium was first produced, the first step in weaponization. French-Israeli cooperation initially remained a secret from the US, Israel’s protector, which repeatedly queried Israel on its activities at Dimona. Among the whistle-blowers were defected Dimona employee Mordechai Vanunu, Israeli professor Israel Shahak, and Israeli-US historian Avner Cohen. Vanunu published an article in London’s Sunday Times in 1986, Shahak released his book “Open Secrets” in 1997, and Cohen brought out “Israel and the Bomb” in 1998. It is significant that Shahak and Cohen published their books more than a decade after Vanunu challenged Israel’s policy of ambiguity.

Vanunu fled Israel but was kidnapped from Rome by Israeli agents, tried, spent 18 years in prison, 11 in solitary confinement, and when released, was banned from travelling outside Israel. I met Vanunu at a dinner party in occupied East Jerusalem soon after he was released from prison in 2004. Branded as a “traitor” by the Israeli government, Vanunu became a sad, lonely figure hanging around the American Colony hotel’s courtyard cafe. Unlike Vanunu, neither Cohen nor Shahak, who was a friend of mine, faced harsh treatment by the Israeli government.

“In 1969, the US accepted the Israeli exceptionalist nuclear status, as long as Israel remained committed to keeping its presence invisible and opaque. This is known as the 1969 Nixon-Meir nuclear deal,” Cohen told MEE. The leaders involved were Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir and US President Richard Nixon. Since then, Israel has stuck to ambiguity while the US has not called this a fraud. It is suspected that Israel conducted a secret bomb test in the South Atlantic/Indian Ocean in 1979 with the cooperation of the apartheid South African government which developed its nuclear programme to reach weaponisation stage but abandoned it in 1989.

While maintaining its policy of nuclear ambiguity, Israel remains the sole regional state to possess nuclear weapons. Israel has vowed not to use them unless it faced an existential threat. However, it was reported during the 1973 October/Ramadan war when Egypt and Syria mounted a surprise attack on Israel, it stood up but did not use nuclear bombs. While Egypt recaptured territory occupied by Israel in Sinai and Syria in the Golan, the US provided Israel with the arms and munitions needed to roll back these advances. This was a destructive intervention. If, instead, the US had imposed a ceasefire in place, both Egypt and Syria might have reached peace treaties with Israel at that time.

Victor Galinsky and Leonard Weiss wrote in March 2025 in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about an “extraordinary three-part series on Israeli television, ‘The Atom and Me,’ [which] lays out how the country got its nuclear weapons.” Effectively torpedoing Israel’s policy of ambiguity, the series describes how the US aided Israel in this effort.

“The United States’ indulgence of Israeli nuclear weapons has not escaped international attention, and the evident hypocrisy has undermined US non-proliferation policy. The US government’s public position continues to be that it does not know anything about Israeli nuclear weapons, and this will apparently continue until Israel releases the United States’ gag. This policy is allegedly enforced by a secret federal bulletin that threatens disciplinary actions for any US official who publicly acknowledges Israel’s nuclear weapons.” The writers exposed the result of this policy: “The existence of these weapons may have started as a deterrent against another Holocaust but has now morphed into an instrument of an aggressive and expansionist Israel.”

This has been notably true during the premiership of Netanyahu — who Galinsky and Weiss wrote — bragged about nuclear weapons in a 2016 speech on the delivery of Israel’s Rahav submarine which was built by Germany. “The Times of Israel, using the standard “according to foreign reports,” described the submarine as “capable of delivering a nuclear payload.” In his speech, Netanyahu said, “Above all else, our submarine fleet acts as a deterrent to our enemies... They need to know that Israel can attack, with great might, anyone who tries to harm it.” The writers asked, “How else, other than with nuclear weapons, can a submarine be a deterrent?”