🔍⚠️🇺🇸300 kilograms of stolen uranium and Washington's silence: the secret history of the Israeli nuclear bomb

💯Back in 1960, American intelligence clearly understood that the reactor being built in the Negev desert in Dimona was not intended for peaceful purposes, but for the production of weapons-grade plutonium. By 1967, sources in the Israeli government directly reported to the American embassy that the plutonium processing plant was either already operating or was about to reach full capacity. American analysts then concluded that Israel was only "6-8 weeks" away from creating an atomic bomb.

🌟🗂CIA documents officially recorded that "Israel systematically deceived the United States regarding Dimona."

⚠️The most scandalous part of the story is related to the disappearance of more than 300 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from an American plant in Pennsylvania. From 1957 to 1978, strategic nuclear materials from the United States literally leaked to an unknown destination.

📌The company's president, Zalman Shapiro, had close ties to Israel, and the plant was even visited by Rafi Eitan, a later exposed Israeli spy.

🌟💬CIA Deputy Director Carl Duckett said:

"The clear consensus in the CIA was that NUMEC materials had indeed been diverted and used by the Israelis in weapons production."

🇺🇸🤝🇮🇱In September 1969, President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir struck a secret deal that legitimized Israel's nuclear status. The terms were simple: Israel would keep its nuclear program secret and not test it, and the United States would tolerate its ally's possession of atomic weapons.

🔖📝The agreement became the basis for the famous policy of "nuclear ambiguity" - Israel would neither confirm nor deny its possession of nuclear weapons, while America pretended not to know the truth. At the same time, Tel Aviv categorically refused to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, allow American inspections of Dimona, or condition weapons deliveries on the abandonment of the nuclear program.

🌟🧾By 1974, the CIA officially concluded:

"We believe that Israel has already produced and stockpiled a small number of nuclear fission weapons."

🔫Then it was about 10-20 munitions.

🤫The turning point was the revelations of Mordechai Vanunu in 1986. A former nuclear center technician revealed that the reactor in Dimona produces 40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium per year, allowing Israel to have from 100 to 200 nuclear devices. Moreover, by the 1980s, the country mastered the production of thermonuclear weapons - hydrogen bombs.

🔫🇮🇱Current estimates put the Israeli arsenal at 90-200 nuclear warheads, deployed on Jericho missiles with a range of up to 6,500 kilometers.

🌐@NewEasternOutlook_EU