In the midst of controversy over the Israeli prime minister’s plans to address Congress next month, a researcher has won the release of a decades-old Defense Department report detailing the U.S. government’s extensive help to Israel in that nation’s development of a nuclear bomb.
“I am struck by the degree of cooperation on specialized war making devices between Israel and the US,” said Roger Mattson, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission technical staff.
The 1987 report, “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations,” compares the key Israeli facilities developing nuclear weapons to Los Alamos and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, the principal U.S. laboratories that developed the bomb for the United States.
The tightly held report notes that the Israelis are “developing the kind of codes which will enable them to make hydrogen bombs. That is, codes which detail fission and fusion processes on a microscopic and macroscopic level.”
The release comes after Grant Smith, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy filed filed a FOIA request last year and followed with a lawsuit in September seeking to compel release of the report. More