ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to trace Israel's nuclear history and its distinct profile as an undeclared nuclear weapons state in a way. It deals with raising fundamental questions to assess the value of this hidden dimension of Israel's security. Technically, Binyamin Netanyahu may be complying with the language of opacity, making no explicit reference to nuclear weapons, yet everybody intuitively understands his statement is about nuclear weapons. Israel first initiated its nuclear program in the late 1950s and managed within a single decade––through its own ingenuity and with outside help––to reach and cross the weapons threshold. Nuclear weapons are unlike any other type of weapon, especially given the extreme difficulty in finding their application either militarily prudent or morally justifiable. Ben-Gurion and his generation thus viewed the bomb as a "last resort" weapon, to be activated only in extremis: in the case of an Israeli catastrophe during a conventional war.
