Vanunu on Israeli Nuclear Arsenal

Jeffrey’s “post”:http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/1015/spying-on-the-bomb about the National Security Archives’ recently-released documents related to the South African and French nuclear arsenals reminded me that Mordechai Vanunu issued his estimate of the Israeli nuclear weapons arsenal this past December.

Vanunu, in a 21 December interview with _Voyenny Parad_, said:

Question: Do you know how many nuclear bombs Israel has?

Mordechai Vanunu: When I worked at Dimona, nuclear materials were already being produced there – plutonim, lithium, tritium, and others. Enough to make ten nuclear bombs per year. In other words, starting from 1985, Israel has over 200 nuclear warheads by now.

It’s a bit old, but “this paper”:http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/farr.htm from the USAF Counterproliferation Center contains a series of estimates of the Israeli arsenal (see Appendix A).

ACA uses an estimate of “75-200 nuclear weapons”:http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/Nuclearweaponswhohaswhat.asp , FYI.

3 thoughts on “Vanunu on Israeli Nuclear Arsenal

  1. Haninah

    Well, I have no idea about Libya in the 1950s, as that poster mentions, but the US certainly had nukes in Turkey by the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Reply

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