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While there is little doubt as to Israel's status as a NWS, there is a great deal of uncertainty as to exact nature of Israeli nuclear capabilities. This is because there is no confirmed or authoritative data about any aspect of Israel's nuclear capabilities. Consistent with its policy of nuclear opacity, Israel has never released any information about its nuclear activities. And because Israel is not a party to the NPT, it has never had to declare the amount of fissile material it has produced and stockpiled.
The result is that there are only speculative estimates as to the exact size of its capabilities, either in reference to the size of its arsenal or to the amount of fissile material it has generated. The estimates were made on the basis of certain working assumptions (e.g., the power of Dimona reactor, its operational procedures, Israeli weapon design), but there is no authoritative knowledge to support any of these working assumptions. While it is true that many of these estimates were based on the technical information Vanunu provided to the Sunday Times in 1986, it is important to note that close technical scrutiny of this information indicates the existence of gaps or sheer inconsistencies.[10]
Given this fact, it is not surprising that the estimates maintain a large margin of error. David Albright, for example, calculated that Israel could have produced between 370kg to 650kg of weapons grade plutonium by 1999, depending on the working assumption. Furthermore, while some rough estimates could be made as to the amount of plutonium that Israel has produced, there is even less clarity as to the quantities of highly enriched uranium (HEU) that Israel could have produced at Dimona.
These uncertainties are compounded when it comes to estimating the size of the arsenal because one needs to include assumptions about weapon design and efficiency. Indeed, estimates on Israel's arsenal size range from as few as 75 weapons to as many as 400. One could note, though, that until the Vanunu testimony in 1986, Israel's nuclear arsenal had been estimated to be in the area of two or three dozen weapons.
Initially the Sunday Times made the claim that Vanunu's information about Israeli plutonium production in Dimona implied that Israel might have as many as 200 bombs. In his subsequent book, The Invisible Bomb, British physicist Frank Barnaby, the scientist who had interviewed Vanunu for the Sunday Times, was more cautious in his analysis (as he allowed wider margins of uncertainty) when he made the estimate that Israel "produced enough plutonium to construct between 100 to 200 nuclear weapons." He also estimated, based on Vanunu's reporting of the production of Lithium-6 in Dimona, that "Israel may have about 35 thermonuclear weapons."[11] One year later, in The Samson Option, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh suggested a more grandiose estimate (attributed it to anonymous US intelligence sources), claiming that Israel may possess "hundreds" of nuclear weapons of all types, from the low-yield, enhanced radiation "neutron" design, including those in the form of mines and artillery shells, to the large thermonuclear weapons.[12] A decade later, Joseph Cirincione of the Non-Proliferation Project of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace made the estimate in his book Deadly Arsenals that "Israel is thought to possess enough nuclear material for between 98 and 172 weapons."[13]
[10] Many analysts explain these gaps and inconsistencies (especially as to the power of the Dimona rector and its production rate) by the fact that Vanunu had only a limited understanding of the larger picture of the Dimona facility, its working procedure, and its history. If true, all historical extrapolations based on Vanunu's disclosure are intrinsically problematic. One should also keep in mind that Vanunu's information related to the situation at Dimona (as Vanunu understood it to be) at the time he left, in 1986.
[11] Frank Barnaby, The Invisible Bomb (London: I.B.Taurus, 1989), p. 24.
[12] Seymour Hersh, The Samson Option (New York: Random House, 1991), pp. 291, 312, 319.
[13] Joseph Cirincione, Deadly Weapons (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2002), p. 221. It is interesting to note that Carnegie's estimate is not an independent assessment, based on exclusive information and working assumptions, but extrapolated from the estimate of Israel's quantities of fissile material made in David Albright, Frans Berkhout, and William Walker, Plutonium and Highly Enriched Uranium 1996: World Inventories, Capabilities and Policies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 263.
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Updated April 2004 |
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