December 17, 2024
William Burr and Avner Cohen, editors
The following is an excerpt from the National Security Archive.
Washington, D.C., December 17, 2024 – A recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to correctly and unequivocally state that Israel’s Dimona nuclear project would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related. All known, subsequent U.S. intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s, when Israel reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the U.S. and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.
The newly released intelligence report is one of 20 documents featured in a new Electronic Briefing Book published today by the National Security Archive, the latest in a series of declassified document collections edited by Archive senior analyst William Burr and Professor Avner Cohen (Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey) concerning U.S. policy toward the Israeli nuclear weapons program and the complex problems that it raised for U.S. diplomacy during the 1960s and 1970s.
An equally intriguing, declassified U.S. intelligence analysis revealed that several Israeli sources had informed the U.S. 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. While the intelligence arm of the State Department could neither prove nor disprove those dramatic allegations, it evaluated some of them 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.
Continue reading at the National Security Archive.
