Plutonium in the Textile Plant: Israel and America at the Dawn of Non-Proliferation

Beginning in approximately 1954, Israel initiated a military nuclear program in an attempt to secure its permanent national security. In 1967, it would succeed by producing its first nuclear warhead. In the intervening thirteen years, Israel engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the United States, in which Israel successfully evaded and confounded various earnest but ill-fated American attempts at espionage and arms control. This paper investigates the primarily American attempts to obstruct the Israeli nuclear program, and the methods by which Israel outmaneuvered American intelligence and arms controls. It finds that while America genuinely sought to block the Israeli nuclear program, the complexity and novelty of the problem of comprehensive arms control ensured that American spies, scientists, and diplomats were not prepared to detect and block the Israeli program. In particular, flaws in the American approach to the fields of intelligence collection, on-site inspections, and international export/materiel controls doomed the American objective of a non-nuclear Israel to failure.