In late August 2021, United States President Joseph Biden hosted the newly elected Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennet, at the White House for an official meeting. Shortly after, Israeli journalist Barak Ravid reported that Biden and Bennet ‘reaffirmed the strategic understandings’ between the two allies on Israel’s ‘alleged undeclared military nuclear program’, noting that this reaffirmation of policy has been repeated by every US President since Richard Nixon.¹ As shall be explored below, this statement is mostly accurate, with the seemingly glaring exception of President George H.W. Bush. Upon its publication, Ravid’s story became the most recent in a long line of reports detailing this repeated commitment by US presidents to their Israeli counterparts.²

What role does this commitment play in Israel’s long history with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)? The primary aim of this article is to answer this question by charting Israel’s relationship with the NPT and its decades-long fear of American coercion to join it. A secondary aim of this article is to provide a concise primer, or introduction, to this nuanced question for scholars and students alike, by reviewing the existing literature and adding insights from new archival sources to this growing body of work.

The paper proceeds in three parts. The first charts the emergence of Israel’s NPT policy and the technical-diplomatic road which led to the emergence of the policy in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The second charts how this policy impacted Israel’s nuclear energy policy in the following decades, ultimately preventing it from pursuing its plan of launching a massive civilian nuclear infrastructure program, specifically nuclear power plants for electricity production. The third concludes with charting Israel’s NPT policy at the end of the Cold War. Research for this study was conducted in archives in the US, United Kingdom, Canada, and Israel, and taps both primary and secondary sources; Hebrew translations are by the author, unless otherwise noted.³