Until now, there was no targeted account of Israel's nuclear historical past. past remedies of the topic relied seriously on rumors, leaks, and journalistic speculations. yet with Israel and the Bomb, Avner Cohen has cast an interpretive political background that attracts on hundreds of thousands of yank and Israeli govt files -- such a lot of them lately declassified and not sooner than stated -- and multiple hundred interviews with key people who performed very important roles during this tale. Cohen finds that Israel crossed the nuclear guns threshold at the eve of the 1967 Six-Day warfare, but it is still ambiguous approximately its nuclear power to at the present time. What made this posture of "opacity" attainable, and the way did it evolve?

Cohen makes a speciality of a two-decade interval from approximately 1950 until eventually 1970, within which David Ben-Gurion's imaginative and prescient of constructing Israel a nuclear-weapon kingdom was once discovered. He weaves jointly the tale of the youth of Israel's nuclear software, from the founding of the Israeli Atomic strength fee in 1952, to the alliance with France that gave Israel the subtle expertise it wanted, to the failure of yank intelligence to spot the Dimona undertaking for what it used to be, to the negotiations among President Nixon and best Minister Meir that ended in the present coverage of secrecy. Cohen additionally analyzes the advanced purposes Israel hid its nuclear application -- from matters over Arab response and the adverse impact of the talk at domestic to attention of America's dedication to nonproliferation.

Israel and the Bomb highlights the major questions and the various powerful matters surrounding Israel's nuclear historical past. This publication might be a severe source for college kids of nuclear proliferation, center East politics, Israeli historical past, and American-Israeli kinfolk, in addition to a revelation for normal readers.