Nuclear security

Desert Mystery: Intelligence Assessments of Israel’s Nuclear Program

Israel’s nuclear program is unique: foreign intelligence agencies extensively evaluated its progress during the Cold War, yet we understand only the outlines of its overall history. As part of its “opacity” policy, Israel refuses to admit to developing weapons at its nuclear facility near the desert town of Dimona, whose name came to stand for the entire nuclear program.

My dissertation research compares how Cold War-era intelligence agencies evaluated the nuclear programs of other countries. With the benefit of hindsight, we can compare these historical evaluations to one another and to the contemporary consensus on Israel’s nuclear program.

The United States was especially eager to understand Israel's nuclear capabilities and intentions, but struggled to do so. Two years ago, historians Avner Cohen and Bill Burr released several documents chronicling the inglorious frustration among friends:

The Eisenhower administration's "discovery" during the last months of 1960 that Israel was secretly building a large nuclear complex at Dimona was a belated one indeed...