Avner Cohen and Bill Burr are two of the best historians on the secret Israeli nuclear program of the 1960s, which made Israel the Middle East’s first nuclear power.

It almost didn’t happen. In a brief for the non-profit National Security Archives and an article for Haaretz.com,Cohen and Burr explain that the program was almost shut down. President John F. Kennedy confronted Israeli leaders in the summer of 1963 demanding stringent inspections.

Throughout the spring and summer of 1963, the leaders of the United States and Israel – President John F. Kennedy and Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol – were engaged in a high-stakes battle of wills over Israel’s nuclear program.

The Israelis resisted because they were determined to secretly build their own nuclear arsenal while pretending otherwise to the Americans and the international community. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 and President Lyndon Johnson never pressed the issue.

With a few years, Mossad masterspy Rafi Eitan had stolen the fissile material from a U.S. facility. With the fissile material in hand, Israel produced its first bomb in 1967 or 1968.

(I tell the story of the CIA’s perspective in the is power struggle in my book The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angelton.)

Fifty years later, Israel is the regions only nuclear power.

Source: How a standoff with the U.S. almost blew up Israel’s nuclear program – Israel News – Haaretz.com

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