☢️ Israel’s Nuclear Secrets: The Bombs No One Wants to Talk About. A Detailed Explainer for Newbies and Gurus Alike.
We simply cannot afford to mince our words any longer. I believe Israel is the single most dangerous, unstable, and threatening nation on Earth.
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🟥 The Worst-Kept Secret in the World
Everybody knows, and everybody pretends not to know. That has been the official posture on Israel’s nuclear arsenal for more than half a century. The policy even has a Hebrew name: amimut — which means opacity. It’s not denial. It’s not admission. It’s a deliberately engineered silence that lets Israel possess the Middle East’s only nuclear arsenal while avoiding the legal tripwires that would normally force sanctions, inspections, or cuts to U.S. aid.
Understand what that opacity really buys. It isn’t modesty. It is impunity. It is a shield of silence that allows Israel to enforce a nuclear monopoly — while waging conventional wars, carrying out military occupations, starving civilians, and still demanding to be treated as the region’s “moral compass.” Western governments go along with the charade because it’s convenient: if Israel never says it has the bomb, U.S. officials never have to say they know it does.
The result? The world’s most dangerous arsenal is treated like a rumor — an open secret, spoken of in euphemism, but never confronted honestly. That’s what we’re going to do here. I will explain in plain language how Israel got the bomb, why it hides it, why the United States protects it, and why this matters right now, as Palestinians in Gaza starve and die under the shadow of weapons no one dares to name.
🟥 Defining the Terms
Part of the deception has always been technical language that clouds public understanding. Let’s strip that away.
When experts say “opacity”, they mean a refusal to confirm or deny nuclear weapons, so as to dodge laws and treaties.
When they mention the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), they’re talking about the 1968 agreement that divided the world into “nuclear-weapon states” (U.S., Russia, U.K., France, China) and “non-nuclear states” who promised not to build bombs in exchange for inspections and access to civilian nuclear energy. Israel never signed.
When they talk about yellowcake, they mean uranium ore concentrate — the raw stuff you refine toward a bomb.
When they say heavy water, they mean a special form of water that makes plutonium production easier.
When they say plutonium reprocessing, they mean the industrial chemistry that extracts bomb-ready metal from reactor fuel.
And when they say triad, they mean three different ways to launch nukes: by aircraft, by land-based missiles, and by submarines. A nuclear triad makes a country nearly impossible to disarm, because if one leg is destroyed, another can still retaliate.
Israel — hidden behind its veil of amimut — built all of these.
🟥 Ben-Gurion’s Obsession
The story begins with Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Survivors of the Holocaust shaped his worldview. He was obsessed with the idea that only nuclear weapons could prevent another catastrophe for the Jewish people. He famously declared:
“What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people.”
From the very birth of the state in 1948, Ben-Gurion sought out Jewish nuclear scientists around the world. Israel’s Defense Forces created special units to search for uranium deposits in the Negev desert. Israeli graduate students were sent abroad — one even studied under Enrico Fermi in Chicago, the man who oversaw the world’s first nuclear chain reaction.
In 1952, Ben-Gurion appointed Ernst David Bergmann, a chemist he trusted deeply, as the first chairman of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission. Bergmann was the architect of Israel’s nuclear future. He worked with the Weizmann Institute to extract uranium from Negev phosphate and even developed techniques to make heavy water — two years ahead of the Americans. From the start, this was not about peaceful energy. This was about the bomb.
🟥 The French Connection and the Dimona Deception
The breakthrough came in the mid-1950s. Israel found a desperate, collapsing colonial power in France that needed a partner in the Middle East. The Suez Crisis of 1956 cemented the alliance: France asked Israel to invade Egypt as cover for its own assault on the canal. In return, Israel got what it wanted most — a nuclear reactor.
By 1957, a secret deal was signed. France would provide Israel with a large reactor at Dimona, deep in the Negev desert, and the facilities to reprocess plutonium for bombs. When the reactor parts arrived, Ben-Gurion told the Knesset it was for “agriculture” and desalination. It was a lie so thin that six members of his own Atomic Energy Commission resigned in protest, warning that it would unite the world against Israel.
Thousands of newly arrived immigrants were forced to dig out the site. Hundreds of French engineers and scientists came to help. And Israel created a brand-new intelligence unit, LEKEM, to scour the world for missing technology, often by theft. Later, one of LEKEM’s agents would become a Hollywood mogul, producing blockbusters while running nuclear procurement on the side.
From the very beginning, the nuclear program was wrapped in lies. Israel told the United States that Dimona was a “textile plant.” When U.S. spy planes caught the deception, Washington demanded inspections. Israel stalled, deceived, and built fake control rooms with dummy gauges to fool American scientists. The heart of Dimona, where plutonium was produced, was always kept off-limits.
🟥 The Kennedy Standoff
No U.S. president took the Israeli nuclear program more seriously than John F. Kennedy. Starting in 1961, he pressed Ben-Gurion relentlessly: open Dimona to inspection, prove it’s peaceful, or face a break in U.S. support. By 1963, Kennedy’s demands became an ultimatum. He wrote that if the U.S. could not obtain “reliable information” on Dimona, America’s commitment to Israel could be “seriously jeopardized.”
Kennedy insisted on biannual inspections by qualified American scientists with full access. He refused to budge.
Ben-Gurion responded with evasion. Then, in June 1963 — just one day before Kennedy’s latest ultimatum letter was delivered to the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv — Ben-Gurion abruptly resigned. He claimed it was for “personal reasons.” But historians still debate whether Kennedy’s nuclear pressure was the real reason.
Ben-Gurion’s successor, Levi Eshkol, stalled further. Kennedy pressed him as well, but on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. To this day, some Israeli officials from that era admitted they feared Kennedy might have gone as far as sending U.S. troops to seize Dimona. His death was, quite literally, the end of the confrontation.
☢️ 1967: Israel’s Doomsday Gamble
By the spring of 1967, Israel was less than two decades old and still haunted by the memory of the Holocaust. Its leaders spoke openly of the fear that the surrounding Arab states—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan—might mass their armies and wipe Israel “into the sea.” That language wasn’t only propaganda; it was part of the psychology that drove Israel’s most radical decisions.
Behind closed doors, Israel’s leadership had something new: nuclear weapons in their infancy. Not sleek bombs on missiles or submarines, but crude devices built from plutonium secretly reprocessed at Dimona, the desert reactor the Israelis swore was only for “peaceful purposes.”
In May 1967, as war clouds gathered, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol gave a chilling order. According to multiple Israeli sources, including Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaakov (later known as “Yatza”), Israel’s nuclear scientists were told to assemble two makeshift nuclear devices. These weren’t polished warheads. They were “ugly contraptions,” with wires and protruding parts, mounted on trucks. But they were real bombs.
The plan, code-named Operation Shimshon (the Hebrew for Samson), was biblical in its symbolism. Like the figure of Samson who brought the temple down on himself and his enemies, Israel was preparing a doomsday option: if its defenses collapsed, it would detonate a nuclear device in the desert—possibly in the Sinai—as a “demonstration shot.” The goal was not just military destruction, but psychological shock. It was meant to tell Egypt, Syria, and Jordan: If you push us to the brink, we will take everyone with us.
Seymour Hersh, in The Samson Option, describes how the devices were placed under the direct command of General Yaakov, Israel’s head of weapons development. Yaakov himself later admitted: “We considered a demonstration… It was meant to show that we have the capability, and that we are ready to use it if necessary.”
Think about that. Less than 20 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tiny Israel—before it had even reached its 20th birthday—was already prepared to be the world’s next nuclear state to cross the line.
In the end, the Six-Day War of 1967 didn’t require it. Israel’s conventional forces routed the Arab armies in less than a week, seizing East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza, the Sinai, and the Golan Heights. But the fact that the bombs had been built, armed, and readied for deployment changed history forever.
From that moment forward, Israel was no longer just a small state fighting for survival. It was a nuclear power, even if undeclared, even if hidden. And the lesson Israel carried away was clear: nuclear weapons are the ultimate insurance policy.
This is the birth of what came to be called the “Samson Option.” The idea that if Israel ever faces annihilation, it will bring the whole region down with it. And it is no exaggeration to say that the nuclear shadow of 1967 still hangs over Gaza, over Lebanon, over Iran today.
Why does this matter now? Because every Israeli leader since 1967 has known that in a worst-case scenario, they have the doomsday card to play. And every Arab leader, every Palestinian, every neighboring state has known it too. That imbalance—one people under permanent nuclear monopoly, another people under permanent occupation—is not just military strategy. It’s the structural injustice that defines the modern Middle East.
By 1967, during the Six-Day War, CIA reports suggested Israel could assemble crude nuclear devices within weeks. By 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Israel had an estimated 13 bombs ready for use. Former Defense Minister Moshe Dayan even ordered nuclear-capable aircraft armed and placed on alert, their targets including Cairo and Damascus.
🟥 The Nixon–Meir Pact of Silence
By 1969, the game had changed. Kennedy was dead. Johnson had looked the other way. And Israel’s arsenal was no longer speculation — the CIA believed Israel already had functioning nuclear weapons. The United States faced a choice: confront Israel, or collude in silence.
Richard Nixon, a man who prided himself on ruthless pragmatism, chose silence. In September of 1969, he met secretly with Prime Minister Golda Meir at the White House. What was discussed behind closed doors was never written into treaty form, but every historian of this subject — from Avner Cohen to William Burr — agrees: this was the moment the U.S. government struck its devil’s bargain with Israel.
The terms were simple. Israel would maintain amimut — nuclear opacity. It would not conduct an open test. It would not parade warheads on television or boast of its arsenal. And in return, the United States would stop pressing. No more ultimatums. No more inspectors demanding access to Dimona. No pressure to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the very cornerstone of global nuclear law.
This “pact of silence” became the now 55 year old framework for everything that followed. Every American president since Nixon — Republican and Democrat alike — has honored it. The arrangement created a political fiction so powerful that it still governs Washington today: Israel has nuclear weapons, but we must never admit it.
That silence has real consequences. Under U.S. law, foreign states that develop nuclear weapons outside the NPT are supposed to face restrictions on military aid. If Congress ever officially acknowledged Israel’s arsenal, it would be legally difficult — perhaps impossible — to justify the billions of dollars in annual U.S. aid that flow to Israel’s military. That aid pays for the occupation, for the bombs dropped on Gaza, for the checkpoints strangling Palestinians in the West Bank. Silence is not just convenient. It is profitable.
Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, spelled it out in a 1969 memo: he wrote that Israel was “more likely than almost any other country to actually use its nuclear weapons.” The only thing more dangerous than Israel having the bomb was forcing it to admit it. Better to leave it in the shadows. Better to pretend. So he thought.
And so the great hypocrisy was born. The United States would hammer Iran for enriching uranium. It would bomb Iraq and Syria for daring to build reactors. It would sanction North Korea until its people starved. But Israel? The one country in the Middle East that actually built, tested, and deployed nuclear weapons? For Israel, the rules would not apply.
That double standard was not an accident. It was policy — forged in a private meeting between Nixon and Meir in 1969, and maintained ever since.
To this day, the pact of silence stands. Federal employees in Washington are literally forbidden to publicly acknowledge Israel’s arsenal. Presidents pretend not to know. Journalists tiptoe around the subject. And the result is that the most dangerous arsenal in the Middle East lives in the open, yet cloaked in euphemism.
The Nixon–Meir deal is not just history. It is the architecture of complicity that allows Israel, in 2025, to bomb Gaza under the umbrella of a nuclear arsenal no one dares to name.
This was the birth of the policy of nuclear ambiguity — or as Avner Cohen, the leading historian of Israel’s program, calls it: “the bargain with the bomb.”
From that point forward, Washington chose complicity. Successive presidents upheld the pact. American inspectors were withdrawn. U.S. aid flowed freely. And the most dangerous arsenal in the Middle East was shielded by a conspiracy of silence.
🟥 British and U.S. Complicity
It wasn’t just France. The entire Western alliance, while pretending otherwise, helped Israel build the bomb.
Britain secretly shipped uranium, plutonium, and heavy water. In the 1950s and ’60s, British companies made hundreds of shipments of restricted materials. This included uranium-235, the very stuff used in Hiroshima, and plutonium, the metal of Nagasaki. In 1959 and 1960, 20 tons of heavy water were routed to Israel through a Norwegian front company called Noratom. When exposed decades later, the British government admitted it had known all along the destination was Israel.
The United States played its role too. Even while Kennedy demanded inspections, American intelligence knew about Argentina’s secret shipments of yellowcake uranium to Israel. By the late 1960s, U.S. officials suspected Israel was stealing highly enriched uranium from a plant in Pennsylvania known as the Apollo facility. Whether or not the theft was proven, by 1968 the CIA concluded Israel had already built nuclear weapons.
And yet, instead of punishment, Nixon gave Israel a pact of protection. This became the cornerstone of U.S. policy: don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t stop the aid.
🟥 The Apollo Affair — Stolen Uranium on American Soil
One of the most shocking and least discussed chapters in Israel’s nuclear history happened not in the Middle East, but in small-town Pennsylvania. It is known as the Apollo Affair, and if you’ve never heard of it, that’s by design. Because it implicates Israel in the theft of weapons-grade uranium from the United States itself — and exposes how Washington chose silence over accountability.
Here’s the story. In the 1960s, a private company called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC)operated in Apollo, Pennsylvania. It was run by a businessman named Zalman Shapiro — an ardent Zionist with close ties to the Israeli government. NUMEC had a contract with the U.S. Navy to handle highly enriched uranium (HEU), the most sensitive material in the nuclear world. This wasn’t ore or yellowcake. This was the actual stuff you could put into a bomb core tomorrow.
Then, a mystery began. Auditors discovered that hundreds of pounds of uranium — by some estimates, nearly 600 pounds — were “missing.” The company claimed it was lost in processing waste, stuck in the pipes, or written off as “material unaccounted for.” But insiders and intelligence officials knew that much uranium simply doesn’t disappear. It was diverted. And the prime suspect was Israel.
Declassified documents later revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies strongly suspected a covert Israeli operation. In 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms briefed President Lyndon B. Johnson on evidence that Israel had obtained bomb-ready uranium from NUMEC. The same year, CIA analysts concluded that Israel had already crossed the threshold to build nuclear weapons — and the Apollo diversion was likely part of how.
FBI agents, Atomic Energy Commission inspectors, and congressional investigators all looked into it. In 1978, the General Accounting Office (GAO) produced a report that all but confirmed the uranium had been diverted to Israel. Former CIA officials later admitted openly: “I do not think there is any doubt that the Israelis stole the material.”
And yet — nothing happened. No prosecutions. No sanctions. No rupture in U.S.-Israeli relations. Shapiro was never convicted of theft. Israel was never called out publicly. The reason was political: to acknowledge the theft would have forced the U.S. government to confront Israel’s nuclear weapons program at precisely the moment Washington had chosen to protect it.
This is why the Apollo Affair matters. It shows that Israel did not simply build its nuclear arsenal with French reactors or British heavy water. It stole from its closest ally, on American soil, siphoning off material paid for by U.S. taxpayers, guarded under U.S. law. And when caught, it was shielded by the very government it had robbed.
Think about the hypocrisy. The United States has bombed Iraq, sanctioned Iran, and threatened war over even the suspicion of nuclear materials being diverted. But when Israel diverted actual bomb fuel from Pennsylvania? Silence. Complicity. Business as usual.
The Apollo Affair is not an anecdote. It is proof that Israel’s nuclear arsenal was built not only on deception abroad but on theft at the heart of the American homeland — and that Washington was willing to cover it up to preserve the façade of “special relationship.”
🟥 Israel and Apartheid: A Nuclear Alliance of Secrecy
If you want to understand just how far Israel’s nuclear duplicity has gone, you have to look at its secret partnership with apartheid South Africa. Two pariah states — one enforcing brutal white supremacy on the African continent, the other enforcing settler-colonial rule over Palestinians — found common cause in the shadows of nuclear secrecy.
Declassified documents show that by the 1970s, Israeli officials were in direct talks with South African defense leaders about selling nuclear weapons. Minutes from a 1975 meeting — published decades later by The Guardian — recorded then–Defense Minister Shimon Peres discussing the “various sizes” of nuclear warheads Israel could provide to Pretoria. The code language was obvious: Israel was offering the apartheid regime the bomb.
Think about the implications. The same state that portrays itself as the eternal victim of racism and persecution was ready to hand nuclear firepower to a regime that had outlawed the majority of its own citizens, that had imprisoned Nelson Mandela, that was gunning down Black South Africans for demanding freedom.
Peres, who later won the Nobel Peace Prize, denied it ever happened. But South African military officers, including Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, later confirmed there was in fact a secret agreement — one that would have armed eight Jericho missiles with nuclear warheads.
The cooperation went deeper. South Africa provided Israel with yellowcake uranium — the raw feedstock for bombs — in exchange for advanced military technology. Israeli engineers helped the apartheid regime build its own missile systems. And when the mysterious Vela Incident of 1979 flashed in the South Atlantic — the unmistakable signal of a nuclear test — U.S. officials quietly concluded it was an Israeli–South African joint detonation. Washington covered it up. Again.
Understand what this means. Israel’s nuclear program was never just about “defending Jewish survival.” It was about power and leverage, no matter who got hurt. To do business with the architects of apartheid South Africa — to swap uranium for weapons, to plan nuclear deals with a racist state built on the backs of enslaved labor — was not an act of desperation. It was an act of calculated immorality.
And yet, the world said almost nothing. Why? Because to expose Israel’s nuclear partnership with South Africa would have exposed the full hypocrisy of Western policy. The United States and Europe were loudly condemning apartheid in public, but in the shadows they were protecting the state that was arming it with the deadliest weapons known to man.
This is why Israel’s amimut — its nuclear opacity — is so dangerous. It allows the state to cloak its crimes in silence, to sell weapons to monsters while still presenting itself as the West’s “moral ally.” And it allows American taxpayers, once again, to be made complicit. Because while Black South Africans were being shot in the streets of Soweto, Israel was preparing to arm their oppressors with nuclear warheads — under the shield of U.S. protection.
🟥 The Vela Incident — Israel’s Likely Test
On September 22, 1979, a U.S. satellite called Vela detected a “double flash” in the Indian Ocean — the telltale signature of a nuclear explosion. Officially, the Carter administration covered it up, worried it would force a diplomatic crisis. But historians and physicists overwhelmingly believe it was an Israeli test, likely conducted with apartheid South Africa.
If true, it means Israel not only built the bomb but crossed the line into actual testing. Testing is the very thing Israel promised it would never do under its “ambiguity” doctrine. But like everything else, the lie was covered with silence.
🟥 The Legal Lie of “Non-Proliferation”
The global system that claims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons is called the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Signed in 1968, it was supposed to be the foundation of international law on the bomb. But here’s the truth: it was never about justice. It was about locking in the privileges of a few powers while keeping the rest of the world in chains.
The treaty divided the planet into two classes. On one side, the “nuclear-weapon states”: the United States, the Soviet Union (now Russia), the United Kingdom, France, and China. These five were grandfathered in because they had tested weapons before 1967. On the other side, every other country on earth — forced to sign away the right to ever build bombs, in exchange for access to “peaceful nuclear energy” and the promise of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
Here’s the catch: Israel never signed. Not in 1968. Not in the decades since. By staying outside the treaty, Israel avoided every rule, every inspection, every safeguard. And yet — instead of being punished, it was rewarded. Instead of sanctions, it got billions in annual U.S. aid. Instead of inspections, it got American fighter jets, tanks, and submarines — some even designed to carry nuclear warheads.
Meanwhile, the double standard is brutal. Iran, which actually signed the NPT, faces endless sanctions for enriching uranium that never even reached weapons grade. Iraq was bombed in 1981 before its reactor could be switched on. Syriawas bombed in 2007 for daring to begin construction. North Korea has been strangled with sanctions for decades. But Israel? The only nuclear state in the Middle East? It faces no sanctions, no inspections, no restrictions at all.
Under U.S. law, this hypocrisy is even starker. The Symington and Glenn Amendments — two federal laws passed in the 1970s — explicitly ban U.S. military and economic aid to countries that develop nuclear weapons outside the NPT. By the plain letter of American law, Israel should have lost every dime of U.S. support the moment it crossed the nuclear threshold. Instead, Washington built a workaround: pretend not to know. Federal employees are literally forbidden from acknowledging Israel’s arsenal in public, because to admit the truth would trigger laws that Congress has no intention of enforcing.
And the United Nations? Resolution after resolution has called for a nuclear-free Middle East. But every time, Israel refuses — and the United States vetoes. The result is a global system where law is enforced against the weak, and ignored for the powerful. Where “non-proliferation” means Iran can’t enrich uranium for medical isotopes, but Israel can build hydrogen bombs in the desert with no consequences.
This is not a treaty. It is a lie dressed up as law. A system that keeps Palestinians under permanent siege, while the state besieging them sits on hundreds of warheads the world pretends not to see.
🟥 Mordechai Vanunu — The Israeli Whistleblower Who Told the Truth and Paid the Price
If the Apollo Affair revealed Israel’s theft, then Mordechai Vanunu revealed its secrets. He was not a politician, not a spy, not a general. He was a technician. A working-class man from a Moroccan Jewish family who ended up on the night shift at Dimona, the desert nuclear facility Israel swore to the world was a “textile plant” and then a “peaceful research reactor.”
Vanunu saw what others only guessed. For years he handled the fuel rods, walked the underground labs, and watched as Israel’s hidden scientists manufactured not just crude fission bombs but advanced thermonuclear weapons — the kind of hydrogen bombs that can level entire cities. He saw plutonium cores being produced, neutron initiators being tested, and mock-up bomb assemblies being put together.
And in 1986, he decided to tell the world. Vanunu left Israel with a roll of film in his pocket, smuggling out dozens of photographs from inside Dimona. He took them to London, where the Sunday Times put him in touch with nuclear experts. The experts confirmed what the photos showed: Israel had been lying for decades. It had not just built a handful of bombs — it had produced enough plutonium for up to 200 nuclear weapons, including hydrogen bombs.
The Sunday Times splashed the story across its front page in October 1986. It was the first detailed, undeniable proof of what Israel had always denied. For the first time, the veil of amimut — opacity — was pierced by hard evidence.
Israel’s response was swift and brutal. Mossad agents lured Vanunu to Rome, where he was drugged, stuffed into a shipping container, and smuggled back to Israel in an operation that violated every standard of international law. He was tried in secret, convicted of treason and espionage, and sentenced to 18 years in prison — 11 of them in solitary confinement. His crime was not lying, not betraying troop movements, not selling state secrets to an enemy. His crime was telling the truth to the world.
Even after his release in 2004, Vanunu lived under strict restrictions. He was banned from speaking to foreigners, barred from leaving Israel, and constantly harassed by security services. His life was effectively destroyed.
But the truth he revealed could not be buried again. His photographs and testimony became the foundation for everything the world knows about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Analysts who once spoke in whispers now had hard numbers: Israel wasn’t just a nuclear power, it was a nuclear superpower in miniature — with hundreds of warheads, deliverable by air, land, and sea.
Here’s the irony. The United States and its allies say they champion whistleblowers who expose lies and corruption. They celebrate Soviet dissidents, honor journalists who leak documents about Iran, North Korea, or Russia. But Vanunu? Silence. Western media barely mention his name. Washington pretends he doesn’t exist. Because to honor Vanunu would be to acknowledge the truth he exposed — that the U.S. bankrolls, protects, and arms a state that secretly built one of the largest nuclear arsenals on earth.
Mordechai Vanunu should be remembered as a hero. Instead, he was buried alive. But his courage ripped away the mask, and for that, the world owes him a debt that still has not been paid.
🟥 The Doctrine of Preventive Strikes
Israel not only built nuclear weapons, it built a doctrine of denying them to others.
In 1981, Israel launched Operation Opera, bombing Iraq’s Osirak reactor before it could become operational. In 2007, Israel repeated the move with Operation Orchard, destroying a Syrian reactor under construction in Deir ez-Zor.
Against Iran, Israel has waged a decades-long shadow war: assassinating nuclear scientists in the streets of Tehran, unleashing the Stuxnet cyberweapon to sabotage centrifuges, bombing facilities, and in June 2025, directly striking Iran’s nuclear sites at Fordow, Isfahan, and Natanz.
This is the Begin Doctrine in action: no regional rival is allowed to develop a nuclear option. Israel reserves the right to strike first, even while denying its own arsenal exists.
🟥 Gaza and the Nuclear Shadow
Here’s where the hypocrisy reaches its most grotesque form.
While Israel starves children in Gaza, it does so under the shield of nuclear weapons that no one dares name. The same state that insists Palestinians cannot be trusted with bread or fuel demands the world accept that it alone, in the heart of the Middle East, should wield a doomsday arsenal.
And the mask slips. In November 2023, Israeli minister Amihai Eliyahu said dropping a nuclear bomb on Gaza was “one of the possibilities.” He was suspended from cabinet meetings, but not removed from government. Prime Minister Netanyahu called it a “mistake,” but the arsenal remained in place — a silent threat hanging over the region.
This is why opacity matters. It’s not just a legal game. It’s a structure of impunity. It allows Israel to wage wars like the ongoing genocide in Gaza while keeping its most dangerous weapons hidden in plain sight.
🟥 Explaining the “Samson Option”
When experts talk about the Samson Option, they mean Israel’s ultimate deterrent strategy: if Israel ever faced annihilation, it would unleash its nuclear arsenal in an all-out strike. The name comes from the biblical story of Samson, who brought down the Philistine temple on himself and his enemies.
Western analysts have long speculated that Israel has nuclear landmines in the Golan Heights, nuclear artillery shells, and even “suitcase bombs” — portable nuclear devices. Whether these exist or not, the message is the same: Israel’s arsenal is not just defensive. It is designed to terrify the region into submission.
Western experts believe Israel today possesses between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, with delivery systems by air (F-15s and F-16s), land (Jericho II and III missiles), and sea (Dolphin-class submarines with nuclear cruise missiles). In other words, Israel has a full nuclear triad — the mark of a superpower arsenal.
🟥 Double Standards and U.S. Hypocrisy
Nowhere is the hypocrisy of global politics clearer.
Iran, which signed the NPT, faces crushing sanctions and threats of war for enriching uranium short of weapons grade.
Iraq and Syria were bombed before they could even start civilian reactors.
North Korea is strangled with sanctions for building its arsenal.
But Israel, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, faces no sanctions, no inspections, and no penalties.
Why? Because Washington decided that Israel’s arsenal was not to be spoken of. American presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have upheld the Nixon-Meir pact of silence. Federal employees are literally forbidden from acknowledging Israel’s weapons in public.
As historian Avner Cohen put it:
“It is the worst-kept secret in the world.”
🟥 Washington’s Silence: From CIA to Obama to Trump
Once Nixon and Golda Meir struck their secret bargain in 1969, the silence in Washington became official policy. It wasn’t just a shrug. It was a gag order. From that moment forward, the U.S. intelligence community, the White House, and even Congress were told: you can know, but you can never say.
Declassified documents show how far this went. By the early 1970s, the CIA had firm evidence that Israel possessed nuclear warheads. Internal memos even estimated the numbers. But those assessments were classified at the highest levels, and analysts were warned not to write openly about them. As one former intelligence officer put it: “We all knew. We just weren’t allowed to put it in black and white.”
That culture of enforced silence lasted for decades. Presidents from Carter to Reagan, Clinton to Obama all played the same game. They knew Israel had crossed every line of non-proliferation law. They knew billions in aid were flowing illegally under U.S. statutes. But rather than confront it, they doubled down on secrecy.
It got absurd. In 2009, when reporters asked President Barack Obama directly whether Israel had nuclear weapons, he dodged the question entirely. He gave a lawyer’s answer: “I don’t want to speculate.” Speculate? By then, Vanunu’s photographs had been public for over 20 years. Analysts worldwide had estimated Israel’s stockpile in the hundreds. To “not speculate” was to perform a lie.
And that performance continued into the Biden administration. While Israel dropped bombs on Gaza, Biden signed off on weapons packages worth billions — all while U.S. officials were still forbidden from speaking the words “Israeli nuclear weapons.” The silence was not neutral. It was cover fire. It allowed Israel to wage war under a shield that could never be named, because to name it would unravel the entire web of U.S. complicity.
The press corps went along. American journalists who grill Iran, North Korea, or Russia with hostile questions about nuclear weapons almost never press Israeli officials. When Vanunu revealed the truth, most U.S. newspapers buried the story. When the Vela satellite caught a likely Israeli test, reporters looked the other way. The silence was not only enforced by law. It was upheld by cowardice. And it all continues now with Trump.
And so here we are, in 2025, watching a genocide in Gaza unfold under the umbrella of that same silence. Every bomb dropped, every hospital starved of fuel, every child buried under rubble is shielded by a nuclear arsenal that Washington pretends not to see.
The truth is simple. Silence is complicity. And the silence of Washington — from Nixon to Trump — has been the most powerful protection Israel’s nuclear arsenal ever had.
🟥 Why It Matters Today
This is not ancient history. In 2025, Israel’s nuclear arsenal still casts its shadow over every regional war. When Israel bombs Gaza, Lebanon, or Syria, it does so as a state armed not only with tanks and jets but with hundreds of nuclear warheads. Its enemies know this. The United States knows this. The world knows this.
But because of amimut — opacity — no one is allowed to name it. And because it is unnamed, it is unchallenged.
That silence allows Israel to present itself as a victim, to demand endless U.S. aid, and to act as though it is the threatened party rather than the nuclear hegemon of the Middle East.
It also means American taxpayers — you, me, all of us — are subsidizing the world’s most dangerous secret. Billions of U.S. dollars flow each year to a state that refuses to sign the NPT, refuses inspections, and openly considers dropping nuclear bombs on civilian populations.
🟥 Breaking the Silence
Let’s cut through the fog.
Israel built its arsenal with French reactors, British uranium, American complicity, and stolen technology.
It lied to the world for decades, creating fake control rooms to deceive inspectors.
It defied U.S. presidents until one, Nixon, finally cut a deal to protect the program forever.
It tested its weapons in secret.
It struck Iraq and Syria to prevent rivals from having what it already had.
It threatens Iran constantly.
And it wages conventional wars under the cover of nuclear deterrence, including the genocide unfolding in Gaza right now.
This is not ambiguity. It is not modesty. It is impunity.
🟥 Why We Must Speak
If the world can sanction Iran, North Korea, and Iraq for nuclear ambitions, but not Israel, then “non-proliferation” is not about peace. It is about power.
Israel’s arsenal is a dark cloud of evil hanging over the region, and the silence of the world about it is the loudest hypocrisy in global politics. To defend Palestine, to defend peace, to defend truth, we have to name what others are afraid to name: Israel is a nuclear state outside the law, shielded by Washington, and emboldened to wage war without accountability.
🟥 Membership Appeal
Friends, I need you here. I am writing what others will not. CNN, the New York Times, and the U.S. government itself will never tell you the truth about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. But we are doing it together. This work takes courage, risk, and resources.
We just crossed 2,500 members. My goal — inshallah — is to overtake the Zionist Substack accounts that dominate the charts with tens of thousands of paid members. We’re not there yet, but every single new subscription is a step toward building a real counter-power that cannot be silenced.
👉🏽 Please, if you read this far, become a member today. Stand with us in breaking the silence: Click here to subscribe.
Love and appreciate each of you.
Your friend and brother,
Shaun
Spent all week working on this so that you all could have the truth all in one place. If they are going to attack me I will fight back like this.
If you have ANY questions about this, please ask away and I'll try my best to answer them.