Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about Israel's nuclear weapons program. Not the politics, not the doctrine, but the hardware. He wants to know three things: how the warheads themselves were developed, the Jericho ballistic missile system most people forget exists, and the submarine fleet that provides a second-strike capability. It's basically a guided tour of a nuclear triad nobody officially admits to having.
It's one of those topics where the public silence is almost louder than any statement could be. I mean, we're talking about an arsenal estimated at around ninety warheads, delivery systems that can reach any capital in the Middle East and well beyond, and a submarine fleet patrolling somewhere in the world's oceans right now — and yet the official position is, and I quote, "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East." That sentence has been repeated verbatim by every Israeli prime minister since the nineteen sixties.
Which is the diplomatic equivalent of winking so hard you pull a muscle.
And that's the doctrine of amimut — deliberate ambiguity. It's not a failure of transparency, it's a strategic choice. By never confirming, Israel avoids triggering international sanctions, avoids the legal obligations that come with being a declared nuclear state, and still gets the deterrent effect because everyone knows.
The world's worst-kept secret that nobody in an official capacity will say out loud. So let's start where the secret started. The Dimona reactor.
So the origins go back to the late nineteen fifties. Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was convinced that only a nuclear deterrent could guarantee the survival of a state surrounded by hostile neighbors with vastly larger populations. And he found a willing partner in France.
France was in a complicated moment — losing Algeria, feeling isolated, and they saw Israel as a useful ally in the region.
In nineteen fifty-seven, France and Israel signed a secret agreement to build a nuclear reactor in the Negev desert, near a town called Dimona. The cover story was that it was a textile plant, and later they said it was a desalination research facility. The official name was the Negev Nuclear Research Center.
A textile plant. In the middle of the desert. With heavy security, anti-aircraft batteries, and French technicians coming and going.
Look, nobody said the cover story was good. But it worked well enough to buy time. Construction began in nineteen fifty-eight. The reactor went critical in nineteen sixty-three. And by nineteen sixty-five, according to most estimates, the plutonium reprocessing facility was operational.
Let's get into the physics of this, because I think most people hear "reactor" and assume it's just making electricity. This was a heavy-water reactor, designed specifically to produce plutonium-two-thirty-nine. Walk me through what that means.
Most commercial reactors use ordinary water as a moderator — that's the stuff that slows down neutrons so they can sustain a chain reaction. But if you want to produce weapons-grade plutonium, you want a reactor that can run on natural uranium fuel and produce plutonium with a very high concentration of the isotope you want, plutonium-two-thirty-nine, without too much of the contaminating isotopes like plutonium-two-forty.
Heavy water gets you that.
Heavy water gets you that. Heavy water is water where the hydrogen atoms are deuterium, which has an extra neutron. It's a much more efficient moderator, which means you can use natural uranium instead of enriched uranium, and you get a cleaner plutonium product. The Dimona reactor was supplied by France, and it was based on a French design — essentially a scaled-down version of their own military plutonium production reactors.
You've got this heavy-water reactor, running at something like forty to seventy megawatts thermal. Not huge by power reactor standards, but perfect for what they needed.
And the key step after you irradiate the fuel is reprocessing — you have to chemically separate the plutonium from the spent fuel. This is nasty, dangerous chemistry. The PUREX process, which is what most nuclear weapons states used, involves dissolving the fuel rods in nitric acid and then using solvent extraction to isolate the plutonium.
Vanunu's photographs in nineteen eighty-six showed exactly this.
Mordechai Vanunu was a technician who worked at Dimona for about nine years. He took around sixty photographs inside the facility, including what appeared to be the reprocessing plant. He gave them to the Sunday Times in London, and when they published in October nineteen eighty-six, it was the first hard evidence the world had that Israel possessed a nuclear weapons program.
The photographs showed a facility that could produce enough plutonium for multiple warheads per year. The estimates that came out of that leak suggested Israel had already produced enough fissile material for somewhere between a hundred and two hundred warheads.
The detail in those photos was remarkable. They showed glove boxes — these sealed containers with built-in gloves for handling radioactive materials — configured in a way that was unmistakably a plutonium reprocessing line. They showed control panels, piping, the layout of the underground facility. It was the smoking gun.
Vanunu paid for it. Lured from London to Rome by a Mossad agent, drugged, smuggled back to Israel, tried in secret, and spent eighteen years in prison, more than eleven of them in solitary confinement.
That's the human cost of the secret. But the technical revelation was that Israel had a mature, industrial-scale plutonium production capability. As of twenty twenty-four, the Federation of American Scientists estimates Israel's stockpile at around eighty to ninety warheads, with enough fissile material for maybe a hundred to two hundred more.
What kind of warheads are we talking about? Because "nuclear warhead" covers a lot of ground.
This is where we have to get into informed speculation, because nobody has published a spec sheet. But based on what we know about the plutonium production rates, the likely design evolution, and comparisons with other programs, the consensus is that Israel started with relatively simple boosted fission devices.
Boosted meaning what?
A boosted fission weapon uses a small amount of fusion fuel — deuterium and tritium gas — injected into the center of the fission core. When the fission chain reaction starts, the heat and pressure cause the fusion fuel to undergo nuclear fusion, which releases a flood of high-energy neutrons. Those neutrons cause more fission in the plutonium core, dramatically increasing the yield without requiring more plutonium.
You get a much bigger bang from the same amount of fissile material.
And it lets you make smaller, lighter warheads, which is critical if you're putting them on missiles. A pure fission device might give you ten to twenty kilotons. A boosted device from the same amount of plutonium could give you a hundred kilotons or more.
There's been speculation about thermonuclear weapons — actual hydrogen bombs.
The evidence here is indirect but compelling. In the late nineteen eighties and early nineties, there were reports — including from the U.Defense Intelligence Agency — that Israel had developed thermonuclear weapons, meaning staged fusion devices, with yields potentially in the megaton range. The logic is straightforward: if you have a triad of delivery systems and you're deterring multiple adversaries at different ranges, you want a range of yields. Sub-kiloton tactical weapons for battlefield use, boosted fission devices in the tens to hundreds of kilotons for most targets, and megaton-class thermonuclear weapons as the ultimate deterrent.
That brings us to the delivery systems. Because a warhead sitting in a bunker in the Negev is not a deterrent. You have to be able to put it on a target. So let's talk about the Jericho.
The Jericho missile family is one of the least discussed but most capable ballistic missile programs in the world. And it started remarkably early. The Jericho One was first tested in nineteen seventy-three — that's the same year as the Yom Kippur War — and it had a range of about five hundred kilometers. It was a solid-fuel, two-stage missile.
Solid fuel is worth pausing on here, because in the early nineteen seventies, most ballistic missiles were liquid-fueled. Liquid fuel gives you better performance, but it's corrosive, it's dangerous, and you can't store the missile fueled — you have to fuel it before launch, which takes hours and makes you vulnerable.
Solid fuel was a deliberate choice for rapid launch capability. You can keep a solid-fuel missile in a silo or on a mobile launcher, ready to fire within minutes. No fueling procedure, no warning to satellites or overflights that something is happening. Israel went straight to solid fuel with the Jericho One, which tells you a lot about their strategic priorities.
Speed and survivability over raw range.
The Jericho One was a short-range system, essentially a theater ballistic missile. But it was the foundation. The Jericho Two, first tested in the late nineteen eighties — there were reported tests in nineteen eighty-seven and nineteen eighty-nine — had a range of somewhere between fifteen hundred and thirty-five hundred kilometers. That puts Damascus, Baghdad, Tehran, and even parts of southern Russia within reach.
Then the Jericho Three.
The Jericho Three is the big one. Operational since around two thousand eight, it's a true intercontinental ballistic missile. Range estimates vary — different sources put it between forty-eight hundred and sixty-five hundred kilometers. At the upper end of that range, it can reach anywhere in Europe, all of Russia west of the Urals, all of China, India, pretty much the entire landmass of Asia and Europe.
There's been persistent speculation about MIRV capability — multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles.
MIRV means you put multiple warheads on a single missile, and each one can be aimed at a different target. It's a force multiplier. A single Jericho Three with, say, three MIRVed warheads could hit three separate cities. And it makes missile defense vastly harder, because you're trying to intercept multiple warheads and probably decoys all coming in at hypersonic speeds.
Where are these things based?
The primary launch site is believed to be Sdot Micha Airbase, in the Judean Hills, west of Jerusalem. Satellite imagery has shown what appear to be hardened underground silos and mobile launcher garages. The terrain there is ideal — you're launching from a relatively high elevation, and the silos are dug into limestone hills that provide natural hardening against attack.
We've built the bomb, and we've got the missile to deliver it. But land-based missiles are vulnerable to a preemptive first strike, no matter how well you harden the silos. If an adversary knows where your missiles are, they can target them. That's where the submarines come in.
The submarines are the ultimate insurance policy. And this is where the strategic thinking gets genuinely impressive, because Israel's geography creates a specific vulnerability that larger nuclear powers don't really face.
Lack of strategic depth.
Israel is tiny. At its narrowest point, it's about fifteen kilometers wide. A nuclear strike on Israeli territory, even a limited one, could be catastrophic in a way that a strike on Russia or the United States simply couldn't be. There's no place to absorb the blow and retaliate from. If your land-based missiles are destroyed in a first strike, you're done.
Unless you have submarines.
Unless you have submarines. A ballistic missile submarine or a cruise missile submarine on patrol is essentially invisible. The ocean is vast, submarines are quiet, and even the most advanced anti-submarine warfare capabilities can't guarantee finding one. So an adversary contemplating a first strike has to assume that even if they destroy every land-based launcher and every airbase, there are still nuclear-armed submarines somewhere in the world's oceans, ready to retaliate.
That's the second-strike guarantee. The knowledge that no matter what you do, you cannot prevent a devastating counterattack. It's what keeps the peace.
Israel's submarine fleet is built around the Dolphin class, purchased from Germany. The first three — the Dolphin, the Leviathan, and the Tekumah — were delivered between nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand. These are diesel-electric submarines, built by Howaldtswerke-Deutsche Werft in Kiel, and they're based on the German Type two-twelve design but significantly modified for Israeli requirements.
Germany subsidized these heavily.
Germany covered a substantial portion of the cost — initially about fifty percent for the first two, and then about a third for subsequent boats. This is part of Germany's broader commitment to Israeli security, rooted in historical responsibility. The total program has been worth several billion euros.
What makes these submarines nuclear-capable is the torpedo tubes. Specifically, the six hundred fifty millimeter tubes.
Standard heavy torpedo tubes are five hundred thirty-three millimeters. The Dolphins have four of those, plus four larger six hundred fifty millimeter tubes. Those oversized tubes are widely believed to be designed for launching nuclear-armed cruise missiles. The missile in question is thought to be a variant of the Popeye Turbo — a submarine-launched cruise missile with an estimated range of about fifteen hundred kilometers.
There was that test in the Indian Ocean.
In two thousand two, Jane's Defence Weekly reported that the Israeli Navy had test-fired a cruise missile from a Dolphin-class submarine in the Indian Ocean, hitting a target at a range of about fifteen hundred kilometers. The test was observed by U.Nobody officially confirmed it, but the report was widely accepted as credible.
Fifteen hundred kilometers from a submarine means you can be on patrol in the Indian Ocean or the Mediterranean and hold targets across the entire Middle East at risk. And nobody knows where you are.
The Dolphins are also equipped with air-independent propulsion, or AIP, which allows them to remain submerged for weeks at a time without surfacing or snorkeling. A conventional diesel-electric submarine normally has to surface or run a snorkel to recharge its batteries every few days. AIP uses fuel cells to generate electricity while submerged, which drastically reduces the submarine's detectability.
You've got a submarine that can stay hidden for weeks, carrying nuclear-armed cruise missiles, on patrol somewhere in the world's oceans, and its existence alone guarantees that any attack on Israel could be met with a devastating response.
The fleet has been expanding. Israel now has five Dolphin-class submarines as of twenty twenty-five — the three original Dolphins plus two newer Dolphin Two class boats, the Tanin and the Rahav, delivered in twenty fourteen and twenty sixteen. These are larger, more advanced, with longer endurance. And a sixth submarine, the Drakon — that's Hebrew for "dragon" — is on order from Germany, with delivery expected around twenty twenty-seven.
The Drakon is interesting because there's been speculation about a vertical launch system, which would allow it to carry ballistic missiles rather than just cruise missiles.
Yes, and that would be a significant upgrade. A vertical launch system on a submarine allows you to carry larger, longer-range ballistic missiles. If the Drakon has that capability, it would essentially give Israel a true nuclear ballistic missile submarine — an SSBN in naval terminology — rather than just a cruise missile submarine. That's a different class of deterrent entirely. Ballistic missiles are faster, harder to intercept, and can carry heavier payloads.
Let's step back and look at the full picture. Israel has built what amounts to a complete nuclear triad — air-delivered weapons from fighter aircraft, land-based ballistic missiles in hardened silos, and submarine-launched cruise missiles for second-strike capability. This is the same structure that the United States and Russia maintain, scaled down for a small state with unique vulnerabilities.
The triad is designed around those vulnerabilities. The air leg — fighter-bombers like the F-fifteen and F-sixteen, and now the F-thirty-five — gives you flexibility. You can use conventional or nuclear weapons, you can strike with precision, and you can signal intent by putting planes in the air without actually attacking. The land leg — the Jericho missiles — gives you speed and range. A Jericho Three can hit a target thousands of kilometers away within about thirty minutes of launch. And the sea leg — the submarines — gives you survivability. Even if Israel itself is devastated, those submarines can still retaliate.
This brings us back to amimut. The ambiguity doctrine. Because here's the thing: all of this — the warheads, the missiles, the submarines — exists in a kind of strategic twilight zone. Everyone knows it's real. Satellite imagery shows the silos. Naval observers track the submarines. The Vanunu photographs proved the reprocessing capability. But Israel has never confirmed any of it.
That's not a bug, it's a feature. By not officially acknowledging the arsenal, Israel avoids several problems. First, it doesn't trigger the automatic sanctions that would come with violating the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty — which Israel never signed, by the way, so technically it's not in violation of anything.
Can't violate a treaty you never joined.
Second, it prevents the domestic political debate that would inevitably follow a formal declaration. Third, and most importantly from a strategic perspective, it creates what's called "calculated ambiguity" — adversaries have to assume the worst, but they can't use an Israeli declaration as a pretext for their own nuclear programs.
There's an irony here worth pointing out. The ambiguity doctrine works precisely because the secret is so badly kept. If nobody knew about the arsenal, there would be no deterrent. If it were fully declared, there would be political costs. The sweet spot is exactly where Israel operates: unofficial knowledge that's so widespread and so detailed that everyone factors it into their calculations, without any official statement that can be pointed to.
The detail matters. It's not just "Israel probably has nuclear weapons." It's "Israel has an estimated ninety warheads with yields ranging from sub-kiloton to megaton-class, deliverable by fighter-bombers, intermediate-range ballistic missiles, and submarine-launched cruise missiles, with a guaranteed second-strike capability." That level of specificity — even when it's based on intelligence estimates rather than official disclosures — shapes adversary behavior in very concrete ways.
Consider Iran's calculations. If Israel had, say, ten warheads and only aircraft to deliver them, Iran might calculate that it could absorb a strike and still achieve its objectives. But ninety warheads, including missile-delivered and submarine-launched weapons? That's a different equation entirely. You can't absorb that. You can't prevent it. You can't even be sure you've destroyed the launch capability, because there are submarines you can't find.
This is where the triad logic really bites. Let's say Iran develops a nuclear weapon and decides to launch a first strike against Israel. They'd have to simultaneously destroy the Jericho silos at Sdot Micha, the airbases where nuclear-capable aircraft are based, and somehow locate and destroy multiple diesel-electric submarines that could be anywhere in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, or even further afield.
It's not possible. Even the United States Navy, with all its anti-submarine warfare capabilities, can't guarantee finding a quiet diesel-electric submarine running on AIP in the open ocean. Iran certainly can't.
The credibility of the deterrent is extremely high. And that's the whole point. You don't build a nuclear triad because you want to use it. You build it because you want everyone to know that using theirs against you would be suicidal.
There's another dimension here that I think gets overlooked, which is the command and control question. Having the weapons is one thing. Being able to use them when you need to, and not use them when you don't, is another.
This is the part we know the least about, for obvious reasons. But the general assumption is that Israel has a robust command and control system with multiple layers of authorization. The prime minister almost certainly has sole release authority, but there would be protocols for what happens if the political leadership is incapacitated.
The Samson Option.
The Samson Option. The term comes from the biblical Samson, who brought down the temple on himself and his enemies. In the strategic context, it refers to a last-resort nuclear strike — if Israel is facing existential destruction, it would use its nuclear weapons even if it meant catastrophic retaliation. The idea was reportedly discussed during the nineteen seventy-three Yom Kippur War, when there was a brief period where the military situation looked dire.
There's a well-known account that during the early days of that war, when Syrian and Egyptian forces were advancing and Israeli defenses were buckling, Prime Minister Golda Meir authorized the arming of nuclear weapons and the preparation of Jericho missiles for potential use. The crisis passed when the conventional military situation improved, but the episode illustrates how close things got.
That experience — the near-miss of nineteen seventy-three — is almost certainly what drove the subsequent investment in the submarine fleet. The lesson was that Israel could not rely on having enough warning time to mobilize and launch a conventional defense. It needed a guaranteed retaliatory capability that could survive a surprise attack. The submarines were the answer.
Where does this leave us? Israel has maintained this posture for decades, and it's been remarkably stable. But the strategic environment is changing. Iran's nuclear program is advancing. The Abraham Accords have reshaped some regional alliances. And the submarine fleet is being upgraded with the Drakon and potentially more advanced boats in the future.
The open question, which nobody can answer definitively, is whether Israel will ever formally acknowledge the arsenal. There are arguments on both sides. Acknowledgment would allow more open strategic planning, more direct deterrence signaling, and potentially more formal security guarantees from allies. But it would also trigger a cascade of diplomatic consequences, including potential sanctions, NPT-related pressure, and a regional arms race that could make the current situation look tame.
My guess is that amimut survives as long as it works. And so far, it's worked. Israel has faced existential threats from multiple directions for decades, and no adversary has used weapons of mass destruction against it. The deterrent has held.
The hardware — the warheads, the missiles, the submarines — is the physical substrate that makes the deterrent credible. The ambiguity is the political strategy. The weapons are the reality that backs it up. Without the triad, amimut would be a bluff. With the triad, it's one of the most successful deterrence postures in modern history.
One thing listeners should take away from this is that nuclear deterrence isn't just about having the bomb. It's about delivery systems, survivability, command and control, and credibility. A nuclear weapon in a bunker that can be destroyed before it's used is not a deterrent. A nuclear weapon on a submarine that nobody can find is.
That's a concept that applies beyond Israel. When you read about North Korea's missile tests, or China's nuclear submarine program, or Russia's new ICBMs, the same logic applies. It's not about how many warheads you have on paper. It's about how many you can credibly deliver after absorbing a first strike. The triad structure — air, land, sea — exists because it's the most reliable way to ensure that at least one leg survives.
The Jericho Three is a fascinating case study in how a small country builds an ICBM. They didn't start from scratch — they leveraged technology from France, from their own space launch program, from wherever they could get it. And they iterated. Jericho One, Jericho Two, Jericho Three. Each generation solved a new problem, extended the range, improved the guidance, increased the payload.
The space launch connection is worth mentioning. Israel's Shavit space launch vehicle, which puts satellites into orbit, is derived from the Jericho Two. That's a common pattern — if you can put a satellite into orbit, you can put a warhead on a trajectory to hit a target on the other side of the planet. The technologies are essentially the same.
The submarines — the collaboration with Germany, the integration of Israeli-designed cruise missiles, the constant quiet upgrades. It's a program that has taken decades to mature, and it's still evolving. The Drakon, when it arrives, may represent a generational leap in capability.
To answer the prompt directly — and we've covered a lot of ground here — the development of the munitions traces back to Dimona, a French-supplied heavy-water reactor optimized for plutonium production, with reprocessing capability that Vanunu's photographs confirmed in nineteen eighty-six. The warheads evolved from simple fission devices to boosted fission and likely thermonuclear designs, with an estimated stockpile of around ninety weapons. The Jericho missile family provides land-based delivery, with the Jericho Three offering ICBM-range capability from hardened silos in the Judean Hills. And the Dolphin-class submarines, armed with nuclear-capable cruise missiles and soon potentially ballistic missiles, guarantee a second-strike capability that makes a successful first strike against Israel essentially impossible.
The triad is complete. The ambiguity is deliberate. And the strategic logic has held for more than half a century.
And now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the Edo period, Japanese sumptuary laws restricted commoners from wearing certain colors and fabrics, including silk and bright reds. Victorian-era historians often attributed these restrictions to a specific shogun, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, claiming his infamous animal protection laws also included dress codes for peasants. In reality, the clothing restrictions were enacted decades earlier by his predecessor, Tokugawa Ietsuna, and Tsunayoshi simply enforced them more visibly. Meanwhile, on the Chatham Islands, the indigenous Moriori people were developing their own sumptuary norms around the same time — though theirs were voluntary, religiously-motivated prohibitions on wearing certain feathers, not state-enforced class markers.
Feather sumptuary law in the Chathams. Of course there are.
Somehow both the most and least relevant thing you've ever told us.
The question we're left with — and I think it's the question that will define the next decade of Israeli strategic planning — is whether amimut survives contact with a nuclear-armed Iran. If Tehran crosses the threshold, the ambiguity that has served Israel so well may become unsustainable. At some point, deterrence requires clarity about what exactly you're deterring.
That's the tension at the heart of this whole thing. Secrecy has been a strength, but it might become a liability if your adversary needs to know exactly what they're risking. The submarine fleet, the Jericho missiles, the warheads — they've kept the peace through ambiguity. Whether they can keep doing so in a more transparent world is the open question.
This has been My Weird Prompts. Thanks to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop, and to everyone who listens and subscribes. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts — it helps other people find the show. We'll be back soon with another one.
