Israeli Nuclear Program
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The Israeli nuclear program is an open intelligence reality that both the Israeli and U.S. governments officially decline to acknowledge. John Kiriakou has described the program as an established fact within the CIA: "Of course Israel has a nuclear program." The conventional wisdom, he said, is that Israel possesses between 120 and 220 nuclear weapons.

Kiriakou offered a concrete illustration of how rigorously the official silence is maintained. A former CIA supervisor of his wrote a historical book on U.S. foreign policy in the 1950s. When the manuscript was submitted for CIA prepublication review, the only phrase the agency redacted was "Israeli nuclear program." He tells the same story elsewhere about a different friend, a retired CIA officer who churns out a book or two a year on obscure foreign-policy topics: when that manuscript went to the Publications Review Board, it too came back with only three words blacked out, "Israeli nuclear program," and the Board told him, "It's not our secret... It's not up to us to protect the secrecy of Israel's nuclear program." In a later account of the same episode Kiriakou identifies the author as his first boss at the CIA, a retired officer who has written at least half a dozen books on narrow foreign-policy subjects, and adds that the officer recognised the redaction as improper, "We didn't classify any Israeli nuclear program. That was improperly classified", but concluded that "it's easier just to take it out."

The reason for the official denial, according to Kiriakou, is legal rather than strategic. The Glenn-Symington Act, named for Senators John Glenn and Stuart Symington, prohibits the United States from providing foreign aid of any kind to a country that possesses a nuclear weapons program and has not signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Israel is the only country in the world that meets both criteria. By maintaining a mutual fiction that Israel has no nuclear program, the United States avoids a legal obligation to cut off billions of dollars in annual aid. "We can just pretend that they don't and continue to give them billions and billions of dollars in aid," Kiriakou said.

Kiriakou described the arrangement as "not just disgraceful, it's dishonest and it's unfair to the American taxpayer." Asked directly where that protective directorate comes from, Kiriakou traces it to AIPAC pressure that filters down through the White House, the National Security Council, and ultimately the CIA director: "It originates with AIPAC."

Israeli premiers' requests to bomb Iran

Kiriakou noted that every Israeli prime minister who visited Washington requested that the American president bomb Iran.  He dates the pattern to his own entry on duty under George H. W. Bush and says every president refused, on the standing assessment that striking Iran would be the start of a third world war by obliging China or Russia to intervene: "every single president said no, we're not bombing Iran."

The point at which that pattern broke, on the account Kiriakou attributes to a source, is also the point at which the official ambiguity broke. He says the Israelis told Donald Trump that if the United States would not destroy the deep bunkers, "we're going to use nuclear weapons", a threat never made before, and that Trump concluded bombing Iran might prevent a world war rather than begin one. Pressed on the implication, Kiriakou agreed that this amounts to Israel having confirmed possession directly to a sitting American president while remaining outside the Non-Proliferation Treaty regime: "they just admitted to the president of the United States that they have nuclear weapons."

Origins and the South African question

Kiriakou dates the program's beginnings to the 1950s, with weapons in hand by the late 1960s or early 1970s, qualifying the timeline as resting on Israeli nuclear whistleblowers, of whom he names Mordechai Vanunu, observing that "he wasn't charged for treason for nothing." Vanunu, he notes in passing, once sent him a Facebook friend request, which he declined.

He also raises, as a question he thinks goes undiscussed, the reports that the apartheid government of South Africa possessed nuclear weapons and handed them to Israel as the regime fell, "why aren't we talking about that?", and situates the relationship in the period's diplomacy, when South Africa was one of the few countries whose vote at the United Nations Israel could routinely count on. He contrasts the trajectory with Argentina and Brazil, both of which began developing weapons in the 1970s and both of which backed off.

Milchan, Netanyahu, and missing yellowcake (SaltCube)

John Kiriakou says FBI documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that both Arnon Milchan and Benjamin Netanyahu were personally involved in smuggling U.S. nuclear secrets out of the country to support the Israeli nuclear program, and that the U.S. covered it up across administrations, as in the case of some 200 kilos of yellowcake that disappeared.

Warheads, treaty status, and the Kennedy claim

Kiriakou's summary of the programme's status is that Israel has never admitted having one, that analysts believe it holds between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads, and that Israel is not a signatory to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, while Iran, "interestingly enough", is.

He has connected the programme to the Kennedy assassination records by way of an account from a friend close to the president: that 10,000 documents will never be released because every one of them points at Israel, and that the Israelis were angry both that John Kennedy would not give them nuclear technology and, more importantly, that he was actively trying to disrupt their acquisition of it. Kiriakou reports the claim as something he was told, and notes his own reaction: "Oh man, that's not one that I was thinking of."

'We should believe them'

In October 2025 Kiriakou put the arsenal at "between 200 and 220 nuclear warheads", the upper end of the range he elsewhere gives as the CIA's conventional wisdom.

The number is not his point. His point is who now controls it. Beyond Benjamin Netanyahu he names Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, "right-wing extremists who have been convicted of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate crimes, felonies, and who now lead the Israeli government. I think that they are crazy enough to use nuclear weapons. And so I think that should be our next great fear."

From that he draws a rule about taking Israeli statements literally: "I think we should believe them when they say that there's no way that they'll lose a war. I think that we should believe them when they threaten Iran with nuclear war. And so the only thing that's going to keep them from doing that is pressure, real pressure from the United States." He welcomed Trump's pressure at the time while noting he could not tell whether it was "a one day or one week event" or actual policy.

Size of the arsenal

Asked during the 2026 Iran war about last-resort nuclear use, John Kiriakou noted that the Israelis "have never acknowledged the existence of a nuclear program or nuclear arsenal," and gave the analytic estimate as "between 80 and 200 warheads." His comment on the spread was that it made no practical difference: "That's enough to kill everybody. Everybody."

His assessment of the circumstances in which the arsenal would be used is at the Samson Option.

See also

- Glenn-Symington Act
- MOSSAD
- AIPAC
