From the infinite darkness of its orbit, more than a hundred thousand kilometres from Earth, surveillance satellite Vela 6911 looked out at the tiny twin flashes of light below. Event 747, as it was logged on surveillance computers, had taken place on the Prince Edward islands, 2,200 kilometres from Cape Town. The sensitive Hydroacoustic Data Acquisition System at Ascession Island soon confirmed the event. Later, more evidence emerged from the thyroid glands of Australian sheep, which grazed along the path of the radioactive plume that had drifted east across the Indian Ocean.
To most scientists, it was evident even then that one nation, or more, had tested a nuclear weapon on 22 September 1979. United States leaders, however, decided it was wise not to know more. They feared that the disclosure of the Israeli test could jeopardise the peace process in the Middle East. President Jimmy Carter asked a panel of experts to provide him with a list of other reasons that might, conceivably, explain the twin flashes.
Even though he was soon equipped with an ironclad excuse from his scientists, the president chose not to hide the truth from himself. “We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of South Africa,” Carter recorded in his private diary.
And that was that.
That hasn’t remained the case, however. Earlier this week, President Donald Trump announced that US negotiators will begin direct talks with Iran on its nuclear programme in the kingdom of Oman. For its part, Iran has confirmed the talks will take place, but indirectly, with Oman’s foreign minister Badr Albusaidi mediating between the two diplomatic delegations.
Finding a middle ground will prove tough because there will be an elephant in the negotiating room: Israel already has nuclear weapons it does not acknowledge in public, which Iran sees as an existential threat. To bring proper nuclear stability to the Middle East, the true nature of the problem has to be acknowledged and engaged with.
Even as the negotiators prepare to travel to Muscat, there are reports that Trump has moved large numbers of B2 bombers to the US base at Diego Garcia. The B2s are believed to be capable of delivering munitions that can destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.
Last month, though, US Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff revealed that Trump had also written to Iran’s government, saying: “We should talk. We should clear up the misconceptions. We should create a verification program so that nobody worries about weaponisation of your nuclear material.”
That’s precisely what former President Barack Obama had sought to do in 2015 through an agreement involving Iran, Germany, and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council: the US, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and France. Then, Trump resiled from the agreement, citing Iranian work on ballistic missiles as a continuing threat to Israel.
The French guarantee
Ever since the release of a three-part Israeli television documentary in 2024, the country’s notoriously secretive nuclear programme has had a public airing. The documentary, The Atom and Me, centres around interviews with Benjamin Blumberg, the head of the Israeli scientific intelligence agency responsible for the nuclear mission. Lakam, Blumberg’s agency, was so secretive that its work was often withheld from Israel’s external intelligence service, Mossad. The interviews were recorded in 2018, with a promise not to air them until Blumberg’s death.
Large parts of the story, though, have long been well-known outside Israel, ever since the publication of historian Avner Cohen’s superb book on the country’s nuclear programme.
Israel joined the US Atoms for Peace civilian-nuclear technology initiative in 1955, leading to a reactor being established at Nahal Sorek in 1960. However, the country’s leaders soon realised that the framework was of no help in developing a nuclear weapon. Its leaders turned, instead, to France. Like Israel, France believed that it needed its own nuclear weapons to ensure survival in a dangerous world. French assistance, including access for Israeli scientists to nuclear research facilities, laid the foundations for its atomic weapons programme in the mid-1950s.
Then-French Prime Minister Guy Mollet, guilty of having drawn Israel into the Suez crisis in 1956, which undermined the fledgling state’s relationship with both the US and the Soviet Union, emotionally declared: “I owe them the bomb, I owe it to them.”
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Making the bomb
French commitment to Israel’s nuclear weapons programme became explicit from the outset of work on the Dimona nuclear reactor in 1958. The plans included all the technological components required for a plutonium-based nuclear weapon, including underground facilities to extract plutonium from spent uranium. From at least 1960, declassified documents reveal the US was aware the Dimona reactor was designed not for the production of energy but for weapons-grade plutonium.
Large amounts of equipment that Israel could not legitimately acquire, it simply stole, Victor Gilinsky and Leonard Weiss have recorded—just like other states in a similar situation, like Pakistan and North Korea.
In 1968, weapons-production quantities of uranium-235 were stolen from a facility in Pennsylvania. This operation appears to have involved some of the same Mossad operatives to kidnap the Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann from Argentina. The spy, arms dealer, and film producer Arnon Milchan, similarly, was involved in the theft of high-speed switches needed to trigger an explosion.
The story soon expanded to include a profoundly disturbing relationship with Apartheid-era South Africa, with Israel using the services of the former Brigadier and mercenary Jonathan Blaauw to acquire uranium. In return, Israel helped South Africa with conventional military know-how, as well as assistance in its own nuclear weapons programme.
From declassified documents revealed in 2010, it is clear Israel was willing to sell technology South Africa used to intimidate its Black African neighbours. In one letter dated 11 November 1974, then-Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres wrote that Israel and the South African apartheid government shared a “common hatred of injustice.”
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The art of the deal
To the US, it was clear from at least 1969 that Israel was a nuclear power, if an undisclosed one. In one memo, then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger made clear that Tel Aviv had at least a dozen surface-to-surface French-made missiles capable of delivering nuclear weapons, and an arsenal of 24-30 warheads. This clearly flew in the face of past Israeli assurances. The previous year, Kissinger noted, then-Ambassador and later Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin had promised Israel would not be “the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East”.
Following protracted discussions at the White House on 26 September 1969, President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir arrived at a landmark secret deal. The US would act as if Israel had no nuclear bombs, thus allowing it to continue military assistance, as long as Israel kept them secret.
Israeli leaders, however, knew that actual deterrence could only be established when their adversaries were certain their nuclear bombs actually worked—hence the tests on Prince Edward Island and the wilful cover-up that followed in the West.
To move forward in the Muscat talks, it is necessary to understand that the existential anxieties that drove Israel are identical to those which underpin the behaviour of Iran and other states with nuclear weapons programmes. Iran fears that, shorn of its missiles and nuclear capabilities, it could be dismantled by its richer Arab neighbours or the US. Trump and Iranian negotiators will have to find guarantees that address the concerns of Iran but also its adversaries like Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Is there such a middle ground? Nuclear theorist Kenneth Waltz suggested in 1981 that when it came to nuclear weapons, “more may be better”. Their very nature, he argued, meant “the measured spread of nuclear weapons is more to be welcomed than feared”. This, he went on, was because in “a conventional world, deterrent threats are ineffective because the damage threatened is distant, limited, and problematic. Nuclear weapons make military miscalculations difficult and politically pertinent prediction easy”.
Put simply: “In a conventional world, one is uncertain about winning or losing. In a nuclear world, one is uncertain [only] about surviving or being annihilated.” Iran’s regime, the argument goes, no more seeks annihilation than does Israel, or North Korea, or Pakistan, or India.
The final answer might lie in Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, whether through design or the failure of negotiations. Even US attacks on Iran, most experts concur, will at most delay Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons by some time. The consequences for the Middle East might seem terrifying—but it might just prove the least destabilising of many terrible choices.
Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)