Mark Curtis reports that Israel’s nuclear arms were seen by British officials as the major obstacle to achieving a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East, declassified files from the 1990s show.
The construction site near Dinoma in the Negev desert for Israel’s then-secret nuclear reactor was taken during 1960. (State Department records at the National Archives/Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain).
By Mark Curtis
Declassified UK
Israel’s nuclear arms programme was seen as the major obstacle to achieving a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, declassified files from 1993 show.
An agreement to introduce such a zone could have curbed Iran’s nuclear ambitions which were then described as being at an “early stage”.
While the U.K. government supported a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East at this time, officials in the Foreign Office saw the “chief problem” to its implementation being Israel’s failure to sign up the U.N.’s Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
That treaty, signed in 1970, committed non-nuclear states not to acquire them.
Iran is a signatory to the NPT and had jointly proposed with Egypt the introduction of a nuclear weapons-free zone in 1974. In 1991, Egypt wrote to the U.N. secretary general calling on the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council and also Israel, Iran and the Arab states, to formally endorse such a zone.
A June 1993 memo from Foreign Office official Jane Govier to Simon Buckle in the Middle East Department referenced Egypt’s letter and stated that the “the UK is in favour” of a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East “and we lend support to the idea in the relevant fora.”
“However, we have never formally responded to the above letter and neither, to our knowledge, have the other permanent Security Council members. The chief problem in any case is one of the regional suspicions, including Israel’s failure to sign the NPT.”
‘Early Stages’
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the U.K. (Anthony O’Neil / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)
At the time, the Foreign Office believed Iran was exploring nuclear options.
Govier wrote, “Although we have no direct evidence, we believe that Iran is pursuing a secret nuclear weapons programme in contravention of their obligations as a non-nuclear weapon state party to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.”
She added: “At present Iran is in the early stages of creating a nuclear R&D infrastructure and lacks key facilities which would enable it to produce the fissile material necessary for a nuclear weapon.”
She wrote that the “best way” to achieve a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East “would be for all states in the region to accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and place all their nuclear facilities under a safeguards agreements [sic] with the International Atomic Energy Agency.”
“However,” she added, “the participation of all states in the region, including Israel, would be necessary, and more progress will probably need to be made in the Middle East Peace Process before this is possible.”
U.S. concerns about Iran were similar to Britain’s. An American document contained in the British archives states:
“Iran could become another Iraq — with weapons of mass destruction programs far advanced and extremely difficult to stop or even slow… We need to prevent this from happening.”
It added: “Fortunately, Iran’s programs are at a relatively early stage of development. We thus have a crucial window of opportunity to stem Iranian proliferation.”
The evidence suggests this window of opportunity was never capitalised on as neither the U.K. nor the U.S. seriously pushed for a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East.
Sir Richard Dalton, who served as Britain’s ambassador to Iran during 2002-06, told us:
“The Middle East nuclear weapons-free zone has long been a most promising proposal to underpin security for all in the region, but it has foundered, like so many other initiatives, on the rock of Israel’s U.S.-backed insistence on standing against multilateral solutions.”
Questions are currently being asked about Israel’s nuclear arsenal following attacks over the weekend by Iran near Israel’s main nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev desert. Iran’s missile attacks on the city of Dimona follow thousands of air strikes by Israel on Iran since late February.
‘Unsafeguarded Nuclear Programme’
Files uncovered by Declassified previously show British officials were aware by the early 1980s that Israel was already a nuclear-armed power. But neither then, nor even still today, do they admit their knowledge of this open secret.
In January 1992, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign secretary Douglas Hurd issued instructions to British diplomats in Moscow to lobby the Russian government not to sell nuclear reactors to Israel or Iran.
He wrote:
“Like the Americans we too are worried about the proliferation implications of these sales. There are considerable concerns about the nuclear programmes of both states [Iran and Israel]. Israel has a substantial, sophisticated and largely unsafeguarded nuclear programme. Although a party to the NPT, Iran seems to have nuclear ambitions out of scale with any possible need for nuclear energy.”
“On Israel,” Hurd added, “you should refer to the recent speculation, point out the concerns about the Israeli nuclear programme, and ask them to reconsider the deal.”
UN Discussions
A photograph of a control room at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant in the 1980s, taken by nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who was later kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel as punishment for revealing its secret nuclear arsenal. (Mordechai Vanunu)
Discussions in the United Nations about a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East have continued over the decades. In recent U.N. General Assembly resolutions, Iran has voted in favour of the zone, along with over 100 countries, but Israel has abstained.
The U.N. secretary general’s report of July 2024 notes that “Many States expressed their concern at the negative impact on regional security and stability owing to the possession of nuclear weapons by Israel.”
It also refers to “many States calling on Israel to accede to the Non-Proliferation Treaty and submit all its nuclear facilities to IAEA comprehensive safeguards.”
Israel has long refused to sign the NPT and is known to be a significant nuclear-armed power that is currently modernising its nuclear arsenal.
The most recent substantive international discussion on the issue of a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East was a U.N. General Assembly conference in November last year which was attended by 22 member states and four observer states, including the U.K.
The U.N. report from the meeting notes: “Members to the Conference identified as a key challenge the continued absence of Israel from the sessions. They noted with regret that the United States of America was the only invited observer State that had not yet attended.”
Mark Curtis is the co-director of Declassified U.K., and the author of five books and many articles on U.K. foreign policy.
This article is from Declassified UK.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
All roads lead back to Washington’s failure to curb Israel’s nuclear weapons program. Did it even try? Did it just turn a blind eye? Or did it help Israel after it had acquired the US’ nuclear secrets?
To me, it suggests that the Israeli infiltration deep into the US government was well-advanced and highly effective in ensuring that it could develop its arsenal of nukes unhindered.
This is a dirty secret, a huge mistake, that will eventually come back and bite the US, if and when it ever wakes up from its Zionist-induced coma.
Israel appears to be poised, on the brink of using its nukes, regardless of the risks to its very survival as a state. Death & destruction to all its perceived enemies [in other words, every country in the region] seems to be its desperate last-ditch attempt to achieve its goals.
Yet somehow the violent aggressive lying entity which refuses to make any attempt to cooperate with its neighbours who actually belong in the region has the support of the USA and many “democracies” blaming Iran for its self defence.
Excerpt of original comment from Scott Ritter’s article “If It Wants, Iran is Days From the Bomb,” published by Consortium News on July 2, 2025:
“Iran’s ‘latent deterrence’ strategy up to this point, and their potential path to securing ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in the form of nuclear and chemical weapons should they end up definitively shifting course, has been directly enabled by the proliferation of proscribed components, technologies, and expertise to those countries by the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, and other aligned states.
As early as the 1960s and into the twenty-first century, nuclear components from US-based facilities such as the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, the NUMEC site in Apollo, PA, and Giza Technologies in Secaucus, NJ were acquired by Israeli-affiliated actors for their nuclear weapons program with the complicity of various US officials and authorities, some of which ended up being proliferated onward to states such as apartheid South Africa, Pakistan, and both pre- and post-revolutionary Iran, according to investigators such as Rep. John Dingell and Daniel Sheehan (accompanying more wide-ranging US and Israeli protection and participation in the A.Q. Khan network, detailed in sources such as David Armstrong and Joseph Trento’s “America and the Islamic Bomb,” which simultaneously increases the probability of Iran being placed under Pakistan’s own nuclear umbrella should their interests sufficiently align). Moreover, from the 1990s onward, seemingly misguided initiatives such as MI6/Mossad joint efforts to supply Iran with chemical weapons components (disclosed in Richard Tomlinson’s case) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s ‘Operation Merlin’ to provide Iran with ostensibly misleading but readily reverse-engineerable nuclear bomb blueprints, alongside Halliburton’s sale of nuclear technology to Iran, have likewise eased Iran’s path to potential WMD acquisition.”