Henry A. Kissinger

Henry A. Kissinger was an American diplomat and political scientist who served as the United States Secretary of State and National Security Advisor under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald R. Ford. In the fall of 1967, while a Harvard University professor and consultant on Vietnam to the Johnson administration, Kissinger visited Tel Aviv to teach for a week at the Israeli Defense College. At the end of his course, he went to William N. Dale's office in the embassy and sent an urgent, top-secret message to the White House, warning about Dimona and concluding that Israel was making nuclear warheads.¹

Kissinger approached inauguration day on January 20, 1969, convinced that Israel's nuclear ambitions were justified and understandable. Once in office, he and Nixon endorsed Israel's nuclear ambitions and shared a contempt for the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty. Kissinger told his staff in the first months of 1969 that Japan, as well as Israel, would be better off with the bomb than without it, believing that nuclear weapons were essential to the national security of both nations. His view was pragmatic: most major powers would eventually obtain nuclear weapons, and the United States could benefit most by helping them do so rather than engaging in futile exercises in morality.²

Kissinger's support for Israel's nuclear weapons program was widely known to the Israeli leadership. This was overtly signaled by the decision in 1969 to end the Floyd Culler inspections of Dimona, a move that became American policy for the next two decades, signifying that Israel had gone nuclear and the United States would not intervene.²