[24][25][26] However, in November 2023, amid the Israel-Hamas war, the junior Heritage Minister Amihay Eliyahu publicly called for dropping a nuclear bomb over Gaza, which some took to be a tacit admission that Israel possesses such a capability.

While a preliminary study was initially prompted by rumors of petroleum fields, one objective of the longer two year survey was to find sources of uranium; some small recoverable amounts were found in phosphate deposits.

France was principal arms supplier for the new Jewish state, and as instability spread through French colonies in North Africa, Israel provided valuable intelligence obtained from contacts with Sephardi Jews in those countries.

During their discussions, the groundwork was laid for France to build a larger nuclear reactor and chemical reprocessing plant, and Prime Minister Guy Mollet, ashamed at having abandoned his commitment to fellow socialists in Israel, supposedly told an aide, "I owe the bomb to them,"[47] while General Paul Ely, Chief of the Defence Staff, said, "We must give them this to guarantee their security, it is vital."

Mollet's successor Maurice Bourgès-Maunoury stated, "I gave you [Israelis] the bomb in order to prevent another Holocaust from befalling the Jewish people and so that Israel could face its enemies in the Middle East.

[49] When the reactor arrived in Israel, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion declared that its purpose was to provide a pumping station to desalinate a billion gallons of seawater annually and turn the desert into an "agricultural paradise".

[51] By the late 1950s Shimon Peres had established and appointed a new intelligence service assigned to search the globe and clandestinely secure technology, materials and equipment needed for the program, by any means necessary.

[52][53][54][55] When Charles de Gaulle became French President in late 1958 he wanted to end French–Israeli nuclear cooperation and said that he would not supply Israel with uranium unless the plant was opened to international inspectors, declared peaceful, and no plutonium was reprocessed.

[56] Through an extended series of negotiations, Shimon Peres finally reached a compromise with Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville over two years later, in which French companies would be able to continue to fulfill their contract obligations and Israel would declare the project peaceful.

According to McCone, Kennedy then instructed National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy to guide Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in collaboration with the CIA director and the AEC chairman, to submit a proposal "as to how some form of international or bilateral U.S. safeguards could be instituted to protect against the contingency mentioned."

"[61] On April 2, 1963, Ambassador Barbour met Prime Minister Ben-Gurion and presented the American request for his "assent to semi-annual visits to Dimona perhaps in May and November, with full access to all parts and instruments in the facility, by qualified U.S.

On May 4, 1963, he replied to the prime minister, assuring him that while "we are watching closely current developments in the Arab world," as to Ben-Gurion's proposal for a joint superpower declaration, Kennedy dismissed both its practicality and its political wisdom.

The confrontation with Israel escalated when the State Department transmitted Kennedy's latest letter to the Tel Aviv embassy on June 15 for immediate delivery to Ben-Gurion by Ambassador Barbour.

He denied that his move was related to any specific policy issues, but the question of the extent to which Kennedy's Dimona pressure played a role remains open to discussion to the present day.

Barbour, apparently wanting to mitigate the bluntness of the letter, assured Eshkol that Kennedy's statement was "factual": Critics of strong U.S.-Israel relations might complicate the diplomatic relationship if Dimona was left uninspected.

[77] He convinced the Labor Party's finance minister Pinchas Sapir of the value of commencing the program by giving him a tour of the Dimona site in early 1968, and soon after Dayan decided that he had the authority to order the start of full production of four to five nuclear warheads a year.

[1] In June 1976, a West Germany army magazine, Wehrtechnik ("defense technology"), claimed that Western intelligence reports documented Israel conducting an underground test in the Negev in 1963.

The book Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East: Dimensions and Responsibilities by Taysir Nashif cites other reports that on November 2, 1966, the country may have carried out a non-nuclear test, speculated to be zero yield or implosion in nature in the Israeli Negev desert.

Most of the committee's members assumed that South African navy vessels had sailed out of Simonstown port, near Cape Town, to a secret location in the Indian Ocean, where they conducted the nuclear test.

After renouncing their nuclear weapons program, South Africa was revealed to only have six large, primitive, aircraft-deliverable atomic bombs with a seventh being built, but no sophisticated miniaturized devices of the artillery shell size.

On December 21 he announced to the Knesset that the government was building a 24 megawatt reactor "which will serve the needs of industry, agriculture, health, and science", and that it "is designed exclusively for peaceful purposes".

[77] The first extensive details of the weapons program came in the London Sunday Times on October 5, 1986, which published information provided by Mordechai Vanunu, a technician formerly employed at the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Dimona.

When Ben-Gurion visited Washington in 1960, he held a series of meetings with State Department officials, and was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the region.

In a memorandum dated July 19, 1969, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger warned that "The Israelis, who are one of the few peoples whose survival is genuinely threatened, are probably more likely than almost any other country to actually use their nuclear weapons."

[168] Soon after the successful test launch, Isaac Ben-Israel, a retired army general and Tel Aviv University professor, told Israeli Channel 2 TV: Everybody can do the math and understand that the significance is that we can reach with a rocket engine to every point in the world.The test came two days after Ehud Olmert, then Israel's Prime Minister, warned that "all options were on the table to prevent Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons" and a few months later Israel bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear facility built with extensive help from North Korea.

[190] The two new boats are an upgraded version of the old Dolphins, and equipped with an air-independent propulsion system, that allow them to remain submerged for longer periods of time than the three nuclear arms-capable submarines that have been in Israel's fleet since 1999.

In November 2023, government minister Amihai Eliyahu claimed that the use of nuclear weapons was "one of the possibilities" when discussing Israel's options in its ongoing military action in the Gaza Strip, for which he was suspended from the Israeli cabinet.

[214] Israel's nuclear doctrine is shaped by its lack of strategic depth: a subsonic fighter jet could cross the 72 kilometres (39 nmi) from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea in just 4 minutes.

One later report said that a Soviet intelligence officer did warn the Egyptian chief of staff, and colleagues of US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger said that the threat of a nuclear exchange caused him to urge for a massive Israeli resupply.

[226][227] Mossad may have also assassinated professor Gerald Bull, an artillery expert, who was leading the Project Babylon supergun for Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, which was capable of delivering a tactical nuclear payload.