Did Israel Finally Confirm It Has Nuclear Weapons by Threatening Gaza?

On Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu indefinitely suspended Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu from cabinet meetings after Eliyahu said nuking Gaza was “one of the possibilities” Israel could use in its ongoing bombardment of the Palestinian territory. It was a shocking comment for many reasons, one of which being that Israel having nuclear weapons is an open secret—but one that its government has never officially confirmed. 

“Analyzing Israel's nuclear arsenal is fraught with uncertainty, not least of which because Israel purposefully does not publicly acknowledge its own possession of nuclear weapons,” Matt Korda, a senior research fellow at the Nuclear Information Project, told Motherboard. “To the best of our knowledge, and based on assessments of satellite imagery, delivery systems, and fissile materials, they have a stockpile of approximately 90 warheads––although this estimate comes with considerable uncertainty.”

Israel discusses its nuclear capabilities in a very specific way called “amimut.” Amimut is about ambiguity—a deliberate policy meant to obfuscate, but never outright deny, the country’s nuclear capabilities. “We won’t be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” is the common response from Israeli politicians when asked about their nukes. What, exactly, “introduce” means is a hotly debated topic that’s involved President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Israeli founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion.

“The government's interpretation of ‘introducing’ nuclear weapons appears to have so many caveats that it is basically meaningless: Israeli policymakers have suggested that ‘introducing’ nuclear weapons would require Israel to test, publicly declare, or actually use its nuclear weapons,” Korda said. “Given that none of these things has taken place, the Israeli government can declare that it has never ‘introduced’ nuclear weapons into the region, despite the very high likelihood that it does indeed maintain a nuclear arsenal.”

The idea that Israel has never tested a nuclear weapon, and therefore never “introduced” one, is in question however. In 1979, a special U.S. satellite used to detect nuclear explosions registered two enormous flashes of light near the Prince Edward Islands in the Indian Ocean. At the time, the Carter administration blamed a glitch in the satellite. Journalists and researchers now believe the explosion was a joint nuclear test by South Africa and Israel, though this has never been concretely confirmed. 

Eliyahu’s comments and subsequent punishment are just the latest in a long line of political problems caused by the apparent Israeli nuclear weapons program. It’s also not the first time that an Israeli politician has let slip that the country has a nuclear arsenal. In 2007, then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted the country had nukes in an interview on German television. “Iran, openly, explicitly and publicly threatens to wipe Israel off the map. Can you say that this is the same level, when they are aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia?” Olmert said during the interview.

One day later during a press conference, Olmert said his comments weren’t an admission of any kind of nuclear weapons program. He fell back on the old line. “Israel will not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East,” he said. “That is our position and nothing about our position has changed.”

Even Netanyahu has uttered the famous phrase. In a 2011 interview with Piers Morgan, the Prime Minister was asked directly about Israel’s nukes. “We have a longstanding policy that we won't be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, and that hasn't changed,” he said.

Morgan asked him if that meant if Israel didn’t have nukes. “That’s our policy,” Netanyahu said. “Not to be the first to introduce weapons into the Middle East.” Israel never confirms nor denies its nuclear weapons program. It’s ambiguous, a liminal space between having weapons and not having them. It’s Amimut.

Israel first began developing nuclear weapons in the 1950s. It bought technology and information from France and used it to put up a research facility near the city of Dimona in 1958. The U.S. wasn’t happy when it learned about the facility and Israel took pains to conceal its true purpose from Washington. The inner workings of the Dimona plant are so secret that when a whistleblower came forward and talked to the British press in 1986, Mossad abducted him. The whistleblower, Mordechai Vanunu, was convicted of treason in Israel and spent 18 years in prison.

By the late 1960s, Israel was close to realizing its nuclear ambitions and Kissinger and Nixon got involved. “Intelligence indicates that Israel is rapidly developing a capability to produce and deploy nuclear weapons, and to deliver them by surface-to-surface missile or by plane,” a 1969 State Department memo to Kissinger said.

The Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson White Houses all thought it important to check Israel’s nuclear ambitions. The early Nixon administration felt the same, but things changed after Nixon met with Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969. There’s no written record of what took place during that meeting, but afterwards the White House stopped pressuring Israel to stop its nuclear weapons program. 

“The United States has been an active supporter of Israel's nuclear ambiguity since its inception, with Henry Kissinger actually playing a key role in crafting this interpretation of the doctrine,” Korda explained. “His formulation of this policy allowed Israel to purchase aircraft from the United States during the Cold War without the U.S. publicly violating its own non-proliferation policies by aiding another country's nuclear program. While this may have been a savvy diplomatic maneuver at the time, the United States' willingness to turn a blind eye to Israel's nuclear program has created a clear double-standard in its approach to non-proliferation.”

Eliyahu said it’s telling that Eliyahu was suspended for his comments. “The country has little to gain by ‘introducing’ nuclear weapons to the region by its own criteria (including announcing their existence), and doing so would likely complicate the United States' ability to provide the country with military support and arms transfers,” he said. “This suggests that the ‘amimut’ policy will likely remain the norm for Israel going forward.”

Since the end of the second world war, the U.S. government has given an estimated $260 billion to Israel for its military operations—more than it has provided to any other country by orders of magnitude.