WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – A series of new declassified documents disclosed that the United States was aware that the Zionist regime was capable of producing weapons-grade plutonium at Dimona military nuclear facility.
The newly released Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee (JAEIC) report from December 1960, published by the National Security Archive, is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to explicitly and unequivocally state that the Zionist regime’s Dimona nuclear facility would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related.
Subsequent U.S. intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s, when the regime reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the United States and the regime reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.
Declassified U.S. intelligence analysis also 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.
The State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research’s (INR) evaluated some of the statements 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 the Zionist regime was systematically deceiving the United States about Dimona as a factual claim.
The newly released intelligence report is the latest in a series of declassified documents concerning U.S. policy toward the Zionist regime’s nuclear weapons program.
The regime, which pursues a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons, is estimated to possess 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, making it the sole possessor of non-conventional arms in West Asia.
It has, however, refused to either allow inspections of its military nuclear facilities or sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) with the invariable support of Washington.