A group of 30 House Democrats has sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio pressing the State Department to end its decades-long policy of “official ambiguity” on Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities.
The letter, dated May 4 and led by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, was sent as the United States continues military operations against the Iranian regime alongside Israel.
“We are, in the fullest sense, fighting this war side by side with a country whose potential nuclear weapons program the United States government officially refuses to acknowledge,” the lawmakers wrote.
“The risks of miscalculation, escalation, and nuclear use in this environment are not theoretical. American service members continue to be deployed throughout the region. Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration’s planning and contingencies for such scenarios. We do not believe we have received that information.”
Questions asked by the lawmakers include whether Israel produces fissile material at the Negev Nuclear Research Center at Dimona, whether Israeli officials have communicated nuclear doctrine or red lines to U.S. counterparts, whether the administration has received assurances that nuclear weapons will not be used in the conflict, and whether the administration has assessed scenarios that could lead Israel to consider nuclear use.
The signers include Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.), Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ro Khanna (Calif.), Greg Casar (Texas), James McGovern (Mass.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.).
The letter cites a March 25 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing in which Castro asked Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and Nonproliferation Thomas DiNanno about Israel’s nuclear capabilities. DiNanno said he was not prepared to answer that question. The lawmakers asked Rubio to identify any department policy that prevented DiNanno from responding and to rescind any such restriction.
“We ask that you hold Israel to the same standard of transparency that the United States expects from any other country that may be pursuing or retaining nuclear weapons capability,” the lawmakers added in the letter.
The U.S. policy of declining to formally acknowledge Israel’s nuclear weapons capabilities traces to at least 1969, according to declassified records published in the State Department’s Foreign Relations of the United States series.
In a declassified July 1969 memorandum to President Richard Nixon, then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger wrote that while the United States might “ideally like to halt actual Israeli possession” of nuclear weapons, “what we really want at a minimum may be just to keep Israeli possession from becoming an established international fact.” Kissinger added that there was broad agreement among top Nixon officials that “public knowledge is almost as dangerous as possession itself.”
Individual U.S. officials have at times publicly listed Israel among nuclear-armed states. The lawmakers cite a December 2006 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in which incoming Secretary of Defense Robert Gates told the panel Iran was likely pursuing nuclear capability as a deterrent because “they are surrounded by powers with nuclear weapons—Pakistan to their east, the Russians to the north, the Israelis to the west, and us in the Persian Gulf.”
The lawmakers wrote that Gates’s testimony, “given under oath before the United States Senate, constitutes a direct acknowledgment by a senior incoming cabinet official, who had already served as Director of Central Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, of Israel’s nuclear weapons status.”
The letter asks for a full response to listed questions by May 18.
The State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday on its position or whether it will respond.
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