Newly-Released Documents Show Nixon White House Concerns About Israeli Nukes

President Nixon's top national security adviser worried that Israel might produce nuclear warheads "clandestinely" and that Israel's ambassador to the United States at the time, Yitzhak Rabin — later Israel's prime minister — might "stonewall" the White House in its efforts to ascertain the Israel's true intentions, according to newly declassified documents.

The papers also show the Nixon administration possessed "circumstantial evidence" that Israel built its nuclear arsenal with "some fissionable material...illegally obtained from the United States" at an unspecified time prior to 1965.

The disclosures emerged in some 123,000 pages of Nixon-era documents released by the National Archives on Wednesday, pages that underscored the ambivalence and alarm toward the prospect of a nuclear-armed Israel that prevailed in both the Johnson and Nixon White Houses.

Israel has long maintained a studied vagueness about whether it possesses nuclear weapons, however current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appeared to remove any doubts about the matter when, during a German television interview last December, he claimed Iran is "aspiring to have nuclear weapons, as America, France, Israel, Russia."

Although Israel is believed to have possessed a formidable nuclear arsenal since the mid-1970s, Olmert's aides claimed he had merely "listed Israel among the list of responsible nations, and not the list of nations which have nuclear weapons." More..