By Jose Nino

Israel has maintained a deliberate posture known as nuclear opacity—in Hebrew, amimut—for nearly six decades. The policy was formally codified in 1969 in a secret accord between Prime Minister Golda Meir and President Richard Nixon, and has remained in place ever since. As Foreign Affairs summarized, it combines secrecy, signaling, and denial: officials are prohibited “both by law and by custom” from discussing nuclear activities; Israel implies capability without confirming it; and the government neither confirms nor denies possession.

The canonical formula, first given by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol in 1966 and repeated ever since by Aviezer Pazner, is that Israel “will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East.” The goal, as scholar Avner Cohen has documented, is to allow Israel to “live in the best of all possible worlds by having the bomb but without having to deal with many of the negative consequences that such possession entails”—namely international sanctions, Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations, and a formal nuclear arms race in the region.