The Sixth Nuclear State Isn’t Iran…

As Western sanctions snap back against Iran, shuttering the prospect for inspections of its battered nuclear facilities, there is another site in the region that is even harder for the international nuclear agency to enter. In the desert town of Dimona, Israel has been hiding extensive nuclear installations, including a suspected stockpile of ninety warheads, from public scrutiny for decades. The last outsiders admitted were a group of American scientists in the 1960s, who were ushered through on a brief tour before pronouncing the program peaceful. Then the gates closed, and Dimona slipped into the geopolitical subconscious.

That silence was broken in 2018, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posed outside the facility to deliver a warning to Iranian leaders with the gravity of a man hinting at Armageddon: “Those who threaten to wipe us out put themselves in similar danger.” Today, satellite imagery suggests that Israel is expanding Dimona—officially the Negev Nuclear Research Center—with construction underway on a new structure that experts say could be either a new reactor for nuclear enrichment or a facility for assembling additional nuclear warheads.

Israel’s nuclear program falls entirely outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which it has not signed. Other nuclear-armed non-signatories are India, Pakistan, and North Korea, which initially acceded but later withdrew. Of these, only Israel is afforded the privilege of nuclear indulgence while its Western allies turn a blind eye.

As the Middle East’s sole nuclear-armed state, operating outside international oversight and shielded by Western double standards, Israel sets the pace for regional proliferation. The nuclear ambitions of its neighbours, most of them bound by NPT obligations and monitored by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), can be traced directly to Dimona. Iran’s nuclear program, developed since the reign of the Shah but weaponized only after the 1979 revolution, is Exhibit A.

Starting its nuclear program in the late 1950s, Israel introduced nuclear weapons into the region’s balance, creating a threat perception that surrounding states needed to balance against. Its preemptive strikes on reactors in Iraq in 1981, Syria in 2007, and most recently in Iran alongside the U.S. underscore the dangerous instability that this regional imbalance causes. What began as hedging against enemy capabilities now risks becoming a full-fledged arms race and could even lead to war.

This race appears already underway. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute recently warned that nuclear weapons once again occupy a central role in world politics, more prominent than at any time since the Cold War. The signs point to a competition where the risks are far higher and the margin for error far narrower.

Israel is actively engaged in normalizing a rhetoric that frames its possession of nuclear weapons as the ultimate resort, often casting Iran as the existential threat that justifies this posture.

Since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, at least two Israeli politicians have called for nuclear strikes on their state’s enemies—a striking departure from the usual silence about Israel’s nuclear program. One of them, Revital Gotliv, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, even went so far as to demand the use of a “doomsday weapon” against Gaza, a small enclave of 2.2 million people.

Silence has long been codified in Israel’s doctrine of nuclear ambiguity, meaning the state will neither confirm nor deny that it has a nuclear arsenal. This enables it to refrain from indicating under which conditions it might employ nuclear weapons, thus bolstering the threat of use and making it a form of deterrence, as well as a driver of proliferation.

The Israeli nuclear arsenal and the accompanying rhetoric create a security environment in which nuclear deterrence may one day give way to nuclear use, whether by design or miscalculation. In a volatile region such as the Middle East, even the perception of unchecked arsenals of weapons of mass destruction can encourage preemptive strikes, trigger arms races, and tempt adversaries to seek parity by whatever means necessary.

By ignoring or even enabling Israel’s exceptionalism, its western allies are not only eroding the proliferation framework designed to guarantee global peace but also deepening the credibility crisis already facing international law. These same governments that level crippling sanctions on Iran for enrichment, which they believe points to a military program, turn a blind eye to Israel’s decades of nuclear defiance.

Western powers cannot continue to rail against the nuclearization of the Middle East while remaining conspicuously silent about Israel’s far more advanced and unmonitored program at the root of this arms race.

To prevent unbridled nuclear proliferation in the region and apply international law transparently and universally, the world’s nuclear powers should put diplomatic pressure on Israel to adopt a policy of nuclear transparency and place its nuclear facilities under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The alternative is grim. If the West persists in its willful blindness, it will further corrode the credibility of the nonproliferation regime and risk encouraging a nuclearized Middle East. In such a scenario, the fallout would not be contained to Israel and its neighbors. It would be global—whether political, economic, or, heaven forbid, even literal.