Plutonium Vanished: The NUMEC Affair and Israel’s Nuclear Shadow

In the 1960s, hundreds of pounds of weapons-grade plutonium quietly disappeared from a U.S. nuclear facility. To this day, no one has officially explained where it went—or who helped it vanish.

This episode of Unsettled: The Hidden Record investigates the NUMEC Affair, a Cold War mystery involving the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation in Apollo, Pennsylvania. The plant reported significant losses of plutonium—just enough, many believe, to fuel Israel’s first atomic bomb.

The CIA suspected espionage. Congressional hearings were inconclusive. The man who ran the facility? A known Zionist with ties to Israeli intelligence.

This is the story of how nuclear secrets, shadow diplomacy, and invisible transfers shaped one of the world’s most opaque nuclear programs.

The trail was never meant to be followed. But the numbers—and the missing material—don’t lie.