…The policy goals of the entire U.S. policymaking community for the Israeli nuclear weapons program were to compel Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to uphold U.S. obligations under that treaty, withhold the sale of nuclear delivery-capable Phantom jets from Israel that they wanted to buy, and compel the Israelis to dismantle their Dimona nuclear weapons facility. Their consensus, as stated in a memo compiled by National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, was to avert a disaster in terms of the peace process. They felt that nuclear weapons would “sharply reduce the chances for any peace settlement in the future”—and, boy, were they ever right.
Israeli policy goals were to buy those nuclear-capable jet fighters, to maintain their Dimona facility, and to get the United States to enter into an Israeli-contrived policy of forever being ambiguous about whether they did or did not have a nuclear weapons program.
And so, these two policy objectives were fundamentally opposed, and the United States decision factors really rotated around the Nixon assessment of the Israel lobby’s ability to mount pressure upon them. Henry Kissinger noted that if they made public the fact that they were going to base sales of these jets on the nuclear program, that an enormous pressure would be mounted on them by the lobby…. there was another consideration within the policy compilation which they all considered. This is something most Americans don’t know about, but there was concern because they knew that the Israelis had in fact stolen weapons-grade uranium from the United States beginning in about 1965 from a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania. more at WRMEA