NSA REPORT: The NUMEC Affair and Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Program
INTRO BY
Nearly seventy years have gone by since Israel embarked on its nuclear program, and almost sixty years have passed since it achieved nuclear weapons capability. However, the narrative of Israel’s nuclear history remains largely unarticulated. The country has not produced an official and sanctioned account of its nuclear development, nor have any insiders been permitted to share their perspectives.
In 1966, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) performed a security inspection at the NUMEC uranium facility located in Apollo, Pennsylvania. During this inspection, the inspector suspected that some of the missing uranium had been transported to France before ultimately reaching Israel. Zalman Shapiro, one of NUMEC’s founders, had established a dubious new enterprise in collaboration with a French organization known as Société D’Applications de la Physique (SAIP). This new venture was named NUMEC Instruments and Controls Corporation (NUMINCO) and was located in Monroeville, Pennsylvania. In 1957, as France was advancing its nuclear program, it initiated a nuclear agreement with Israel, sending engineers to assist in the construction of the nuclear reactor at Dimona, Israel. However, to facilitate the development of nuclear weapons, the newly established state required a plutonium separation facility, which was secretly built by the French company “Saint Gobain.” Shimon Peres, who passed away on September 28, 2016, was a protégé of David Ben-Gurion and played a key role in shaping Israel’s clandestine nuclear program, a program that was developed with French assistance – but whose existence is still officially denied to this day.
In contrast to the seven other nuclear-armed nations, Israel’s approach to nuclear policy is characterized by a deliberate non-recognition. The Israeli government maintains that maintaining silence on nuclear matters is advantageous, referring to its nuclear strategy as “amimut”, a Hebrew term that translates to opacity…
VIDEO: From Dimona to “Deterrence”: How France Gave Israel Their Nuclear Head Start
(Source: Jalyssa Dugrot and Offstage Intel)
National Security Archive – Document collection and introduction by Roger J. Mattson, PhD
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The NUMEC Affair: Did Highly Enriched Uranium from the U.S. Aid Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Program?Beginning more than 50 years ago, and extending over the period from 1957 to 1978, according to official U.S. government records and studies, more than 300 kilograms of uranium 235 (U-235) in the form of highly enriched uranium (HEU) went missing from a nuclear fuel manufacturing plant in the small town of Apollo, Pennsylvania.
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The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) concluded in 1966 that there was about a 200-kilogram deficit between the U-235 in the form of HEU supplied to the plant and the amount returned in products to customers. After the AEC and its Oak Ridge office calculated the processing losses based on NUMEC’s records, they determined that the fate of about 100 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU remained unexplained.
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NUMEC paid for the missing material, but later disputed the AEC calculations, maintaining that the unexplained 100 kgs could be attributed to other processing losses. After the decommissioning of the Apollo plant, more than 330 kgs of U-235 in the form of HEU were unaccounted for, with most of that deficit occurring while NUMEC ran the plant.
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For decades there have been allegations and suspicions that foreign agents, perhaps aided by American citizens, diverted a significant fraction of NUMEC’s unexplained uranium deficits to Israel for its nuclear-weapons program. Because of the high stakes involved, the affair has been clouded in denial and concealment for nearly a half-century. Several recent books and articles, including a book by this Briefing Book’s primary author, Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, have attempted to account for what is known and what is still a mystery. Using recently declassified documents published today for the first time by the National Security Archive and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project, this Electronic Briefing Book aims to make more widely available to the public the fascinating information that has been declassified so far.
The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, commonly known as NUMEC, owned the Apollo uranium plant. A company named Apollo Industries, headed by Morton Chatkin, Ivan J. Novick and David Lowenthal, invested in NUMEC when it was formed in 1957. Novick later headed the Zionist Organization of America. Lowenthal was an American Zionist who played a significant role in the resettlement of Holocaust survivors in Israel.
One of Lowenthal’s partners in Apollo Industries and the president of NUMEC was Dr. Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a chemist who played a key role in the development, at Bettis Laboratory, of the reactor that powered the world’s first nuclear-powered submarine, the USS Nautilus. Shapiro’s work at Bettis Laboratory also involved the development of the fuel for the first commercial nuclear power plant at the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in western Pennsylvania. Shapiro left Bettis to become the technological force behind the creation of NUMEC, which he founded to invent new and improved methods of processing nuclear fuel. Shapiro, along with a group of his principal managers, conceived, designed, built and oversaw the operation of the Apollo plant until the early 1970s. The plant began manufacturing fuel for nuclear reactors in 1959. It processed many tons of uranium in its lifetime, reaching a peak annual throughput of more than 700 metric tons in 1973.
In early 1965, the AEC’s Oak Ridge Operations Office in Tennessee conducted a routine inventory of government-owned HEU that the AEC had leased to NUMEC. As the AEC’s Oak Ridge people suspected, based on past concerns, the inventory disclosed a significant shortage. In early 1966, after extensive investigations, with a concerted effort by NUMEC and AEC to account for all conceivable operating losses, the AEC confirmed that 178 kilograms of U-235 in the form of HEU, the main ingredient for uranium-fueled atom bombs, were missing from the Apollo plant. Within three years, the amount had grown to 269 kilograms.
The AEC, and subsequently its successor agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), as well as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Justice Department, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy (JCAE), the General Accounting Office (GAO), the National Security Council (NSC), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), two committees of the U.S. House of Representatives, spanning four presidential administrations, investigated what became of the missing uranium. Despite their efforts, they never fully accounted for it. Those investigations extended over the period from 1965 to the early 1980s. The investigators all acknowledged that the material might have made its way to Israel, and some in high positions firmly believed it had gone there, but, until recently, hard evidence of a diversion was veiled in secrecy and hard to find.
Today, more is publicly known about the NUMEC affair than ever before….
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