Never a straight answer. Lying has always been the policy…

Throughout her premiership (1969-1974) Golda Meir maintained Israel’s deliberate opacity:

“Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.”

That phrase, used consistently by every prime minister since Ben-Gurion, was the official formula for the policy of amimut (opacity). Decades later Netanyahu is using the exact same words…

JFK, Dimona, and a theater of mirrors

From the first days of his presidency, John F. Kennedy was warned that Israel’s new reactor at Dimona could produce weapons-grade plutonium within a few years.

Kennedy pressed hard for genuine, repeat inspections. He warned Israel in writing that America’s “commitment and support” could be seriously jeopardized if Washington could not obtain reliable information about Israel’s nuclear activities.

In 1963 he demanded biannual access beginning that summer. David Ben-Gurion stalled, then resigned in June; his successor Levi Eshkol inherited a blunt Kennedy letter reiterating the inspection schedule and the warning.

What followed was stagecraft…

Declassified reconstructions and later reporting describe stage-managed tours for U.S. scientists: a fake control room, false instrumentation simulating a smaller reactor, even hidden elevators leading to a subterranean reprocessing plant; the heart of a weapons program the visitors were never meant to see.

The point was simple: keep the reactor “civilian” to American eyes while the real work continued below.

And then, that same year, on November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated.

With his death, the pressure on Dimona dissolved almost overnight. By 1969, President Nixon and Prime Minister Golda Meir reached a quiet understanding: Israel would maintain nuclear ambiguity, never test, never declare, and Washington would stop asking questions.

The policy of opacity, became permanent, and the inspections never returned.

Whether or not the events are connected, the timing remains extraordinary: the only U.S. president who had dared to confront Israel’s nuclear ambitions was removed from the stage, and within a decade, secrecy had become the accepted order.