- On a late September night in 1979,
an American satellite picked up two super-bright flashes
in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
The next day, President Jimmy Carter
called a meeting in the Situation Room.
Everyone agreed: this was a secret nuclear test.
But who was responsible?
The first suspect was South Africa,
but they didn't have the technology.
So the U.S. looked at one of South Africa's
close military allies,
a nation technologically advanced enough
to stage a massive nuclear test
and secretive enough to pull it off in the dead of night.
Israel.
There was just one problem,
nobody knew for sure
whether Israel even had nuclear capabilities.
And this is still true today,
even though the whole world assumes they do,
Israel will neither confirm nor deny it.
But, why?
There's a Hebrew word for Israel's nuclear policy: amimut.
It basically means "deliberate ambiguity".
Experts guess that Israel
has between 80 and 400 nuclear warheads today,
but nobody knows for sure.
Israeli leaders have always been quiet
about their nuclear ambitions.
A strong military defense has been the cornerstone
of Israel's survival since its creation in 1948.
David Ben-Gurion, was apparently "obsessed"
with developing nuclear weapons,
seeing them as the only way
to protect Jews in their homeland.
In those early years,
France was one of Israel's biggest supporters
and the two countries worked together
to develop both of their nuclear abilities.
By the 1960s,
Israel had constructed two nuclear research centers:
Dimona and Soreq.
It's around this time
that Israel is thought to have developed
their first nuclear warhead.
During a meeting with President John F. Kennedy in 1962,
Shimon Peres, Israel's Deputy Minister of Defense,
was asked about Israel's nuclear plans.
He responded with a line that would come to define
the country's nuclear policy:
"I can tell you most clearly
that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region,
and certainly we will not be the first."
That line was the birth of amimut as a political policy.
Other politicians, like Golda Meir and Levi Eshkol,
didn't like Peres's answer.
But they ended up adopting it,
never confirming nor denying
anything about their nuclear power,
because it basically summed up their position.
Israel has no intention
of being the first to attack their enemies
with nuclear weapons.
By the 1970s, Israel's Arab neighbors,
who had spent the last two decades
waging wars against the Jewish State,
were suddenly worried.
Like the rest of the world,
they had no idea how many nuclear warheads Israel had.
By keeping quiet,
Israel let rumors fly across the Arab world.
Eventually, these hostile countries
stopped waging wars so often,
some believe this was in part
because they were scared of what might happen.
As Peres put it in his autobiography,
"We learned there is tremendous power in ambiguity...
Doubt was a powerful deterrent
to those who desired a second Holocaust."
In fact, there's a nickname for the kind of situation
Israel would have to find itself in
before they'd consider nuking their enemies:
the "Samson Option.
Evoking the biblical character of Samson,
who famously killed many Philistines in his final act,
killing himself in the process.
Critics of amimut don't buy this argument.
They see amimut as something Israel hides behind
to avoid international scrutiny.
Along with India, Pakistan and South Sudan,
Israel is one of the only UN member nations
to not sign the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons, precisely because of amimut.
They just don't talk about their nuclear program.
And because they never signed the treaty,
international inspectors
haven't been able to check their facilities.
Supporters of amimut argue that dropping the policy now
could lead to nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
If Israel were to show its cards,
it could create an arms race, particularly with Iran.
Israel's main goal is to prevent nuclear proliferation
at all costs.
Sometimes, that means keeping secrets.
Other times, it means being proactive.
Over the last few decades,
Israeli forces have attacked
and destroyed nuclear facilities in Syria and Iraq
to stop their nuclear expansions.
Cybersecurity experts believe that in the early 2000s,
Israel teamed up with the United States
to create the malware called Stuxnet,
which caused one of Iran's nuclear facilities
to malfunction, essentially putting the kibosh
on their nuclear aspirations.
These aggressive measures share the same goal as amimut:
making sure there are as few nukes as possible
in the Middle East.
Almost no country is actively threatening nuclear war,
but governments all over the world
keep researching nuclear weapons.
And it's not like nuclear power is an open book,
every country is cagey about this subject.
Israel takes that a step further.
But it's a strategy they've made clear,
both in words and actions, aimed at keeping the peace.
If Israel drops amimut and finally shows her cards,
it probably means that nuclear war
has become a real threat
or maybe the threat is finally over
and we have achieved world peace.
Here's hoping it's the second one.