Democrats want Trump to lift lid on Israeli nukes

Continued silence could pose serious risks of escalation in the conflict with Iran, a group of 30 congressmen has said

Published 5 May, 2026 22:39 | Updated 6 May, 2026 05:50

A nuclear power plant is seen near the city of Dimona, Israel, on March 8, 2014.

A group of 30 Democrats in the US House of Representatives have demanded that the administration of President Donald Trump disclose information about Israel’s nuclear arsenal and relevant policies. The lack of transparency threatens the entire Middle East, the lawmakers argue.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied that it possesses nuclear weapons, nor has it publicly presented a doctrine outlining the potential use of them or its red lines. The US, which has been aware of the Israeli nuclear program at least since the early 1960s, has remained silent on the issue.

Washington is fighting “side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” congressmen led by Democratic Representative Joaquin Castro said in a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

“The risks of miscalculation, escalation, and nuclear use in this environment are not theoretical,” the letter stated.

The group has demanded that the US hold Israel to the same standard of transparency as other countries, adding that a “coherent nonproliferation policy for the Middle East,” including Iran’s nuclear program and Saudi nuclear ambitions, would otherwise be impossible.

How big is Israel’s arsenal?

Israel is believed to possess 80 to 90 nuclear weapons, including around 30 bombs and 50 ballistic missile warheads, according to estimates by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Photos from inside an Israeli nuclear facility leaked to the Sunday Times in 1986 suggested that the country could have produced enough material for up to 200 nuclear bombs at the time. Mordechai Vanunu, the technician who leaked the photos, was subsequently kidnapped by Mossad and sentenced to nearly two decades in prison.

What did the US know?

Washington was aware that the NNRC was weapons-related as early as December 1960, according to a Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee statement declassified in 2024. In 1967, Israeli soldiers informed the US Embassy that Israel was “weeks away” from the bomb, according to other declassified documents.

By 1973, Washington “was convinced Israel had nuclear weapons,” according to the Federation of American Scientists. In 1979, an American satellite detected a double flash off the coast of South Africa. Former President Jimmy Carter’s White House diaries, published in 2010, cited a “growing belief” that the flash was an Israeli nuclear test.

Leonard Weiss, a Senate adviser briefed on the matter at the time, claimed that both the Carter and Reagan administrations attempted to gag him over the incident. “I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that the US didn’t want anyone to know about,” he told The Guardian in 2014.

Why the silence?

Declassified CIA files suggest that the intelligence agency informed then-President Lyndon Johnson that Israel had nuclear weapons in 1968. The president ordered then-CIA Director Richard Helms to keep it secret even from Secretary of State Dean Rusk and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Washington allegedly feared that Arab states would refuse to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty if news of Israel’s undeclared weapons came out.

The policy of silence was formalized at a 1969 meeting between US President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, according to Avner Cohen, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies and author of ‘Israel and the Bomb’.

“Israel alone could not have maintained this policy over decades without the United States,” he told the Washington Post on Tuesday.

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