The newly released Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960, published by the National Security Archive on Tuesday, is the first and only known US intelligence report to explicitly and unequivocally state that Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related.
Subsequent US intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s, when Israel reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the United States and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.
Declassified US intelligence analysis also revealed that several Israeli sources had informed the US 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.
The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s (INR) evaluated some of the statements as “plausible” and urged the next inspection team in April 1967 to explore them.
This is the first known document that treated the possibility that Israel was systematically deceiving the United States about Dimona as a factual claim.
The newly released intelligence report is the latest in a series of declassified documents concerning US policy toward the Israeli nuclear weapons program.
Israel, which pursues a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons, is estimated to possess 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, making it the sole possessor of non-conventional arms in West Asia.
It has, however, refused to either allow inspections of its military nuclear facilities or sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with the invariable support of Washington.
