The American Federation of Scientists and the Stockholm Institute of International Peace, an independent international organization dedicated to studying arms management and disarmament, estimates that Israel has around 90 nuclear warheads.
The official stance of ambiguity regarding Israel’s nuclear programme has made organizations more difficult to determine the extent of the country’s nuclear capabilities.
“They are intentionally secret about their nuclear capabilities, and that’s part of the policies they follow,” John Ellas, senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, said in a telephone interview Wednesday.
He said that a policy to ensure that Israel’s “potential enemies don’t know what they can do in times of crisis” is likely.
How did it begin?
Historical records suggest that Israeli leaders wanted to build nuclear weapons to ensure the security of the country after it was founded in 1948 years after the Holocaust, according to the Jewish Virtual Library, an online encyclopedia published by the American foreign policy analyst Mitchellbird – an Israeli cooperative corporation.
In July 1969, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who declassified a memo to President Richard Nixon, said Israel was “not the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the Near East.”
Mordekaivanunu, a former Israeli atomic engineer who worked at the Israeli reactor in Dimona in the Negev desert in the late 1960s and early 1970s, sent shockwaves around the world when he revealed details and photos of the reactor in the Sunday Times newspaper in the UK.
