Does Israel have Atomic Weapons?

[Csargo]

I was in history the other day and we had to do a worksheet that said that maybe Israel has atomic weapons. Does Israel have atomic weapons? I just found that interesting and wanted to know if they really did.

[lars573]

Officially, no.
Unoffcially, yes.

Supplied by the USA. Since they don't officially have them and didn't make them on their own the UN has no data on how many and what kind they are.

[discovery1]

Don't they also have a 'research' reactor, so yes they can make their own?

[Ice]

Yes, they have nuclear arms.

[Strike For The South]

Yes, they have nuclear arms.

You cant hug with nuclear arms

[Reenk Roink]

You cant hug with nuclear arms

But you can throw quite a punch...

[Redleg]

Officially, no.
Unoffcially, yes.

Supplied by the USA. Since they don't officially have them and didn't make them on their own the UN has no data on how many and what kind they are.

I hope you realize of course it was not the United States that supplied Israel with Nuclear Weapons.

On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing plant. This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.

And

There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program. As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact.

United States inspectors visited Dimona seven times during the 1960s, but they were unable to obtain an accurate picture of the activities carried out there, largely due to tight Israeli control over the timing and agenda of the visits. The Israelis went so far as to install false control room panels and to brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility. The inspectors were able to report that there was no clear scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large reactor - circumstantial evidence of the Israeli bomb program - but found no evidence of "weapons related activities" such as the existence of a plutonium reprocessing plant.

Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it. Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news." After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachés' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona. Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon

http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/israel/nuke/