The Glenn-Symington Act is a U.S. law that bars American foreign assistance to any nation with a nuclear program that has not acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. John Kiriakou has described the statute as the legal foundation for the long-standing mutual fiction between the United States and Israel regarding the Israeli nuclear program.
As Kiriakou explained, the law was written by Senators John Glenn and Stuart Symington. Its operative clause states that the United States is not permitted to provide aid of any kind to any country that has a nuclear program and is not a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.[1] By Kiriakou’s account, Israel is the only country in the world that satisfies both conditions — it is broadly understood to possess nuclear weapons and has never signed the NPT.
The practical consequence is that so long as neither Israel nor the United States officially acknowledges the Israeli nuclear program, there is no legal trigger, and the billions of dollars in annual U.S. aid to Israel can continue to flow: “We can just pretend that they don’t and continue to give them billions and billions of dollars in aid,” Kiriakou said.[2] He called this arrangement “not just disgraceful, it’s dishonest and it’s unfair to the American taxpayer.”[2]