Glenn R. Cella

Glenn R. Cella was a foreign service officer who, in the summer of 1971, was assigned to handle political-military affairs on the State Department's Israeli desk. He also became the department's representative on the Middle East Task Force, an interagency group monitoring American arms transfer policies. Cella quickly learned about Carl E. Duckett's suppressed CIA estimate on Israel's nuclear arsenal and realized that any pressure on Israel to stop its nuclear weapons program would not come from the task force or the State Department.¹

Cella was dismayed that a study of the military balance in the region, ordered by the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), made no mention of Israeli nuclear capability. He believed the U.S. ought to "face up to the fact that they had it," but acknowledged that "nobody was allowed to talk about it."¹

A few months later, Cella was notified that an Israeli request for the sale of krytrons had been routinely approved by his Pentagon counterpart on the task force. Cella, initially told they were for strobe lights, later learned that krytrons were essential electronic timing devices used to trigger nuclear bombs. He also noted that the U.S. budget later included funds for two supercomputers for the Weizmann Institute of Science, whose function included nuclear simulation, and he did not fight it.¹