Maybe it was the French alone, or maybe it was at our bidding, but even the articles you sight give credit to a lot of US help.
The first mentions an Israeli that leaves Los Alamos for Israel with real design knowledge.
The second cites the French desire for a nuclear bomb so great that they enter into an agreement with Israel because “Israel could get the technology from America and pass it through to France. The U.S. furnished Israel heavy water, under the Atoms for Peace program, for the small research reactor at Soreq.”
And generally the bombs that Israel already had were most probably the “Gun barrel variety” not the more sophisticated implosion devices. The gun barrel design requires u235 not Pu (Pu has enough spontaneous fissions to make the gun barrel design unstable). When you look at the records for the missing HEU (235) from the Tenn River plant in the US you get a good match to the weight of U235 necessary for the two gun barrel devices.
The additional materials like lithium 6 are not for your basic fission device – but rather supply the Tritium and Deuterium for a fusion device. The design the Israelis finally adopted was probably a Teller Ulahm (sp?) design. And I agree that the French tested it for them. That the Russians also used the same design for their first Hydrogen bomb is of real interest.
It could have been stupidity, or political design, or Israeli intelligence expertise, but the design and materials for bomb one and two and the French designs came from the U.S. That no “official” US-Israeli alliance during the period is interesting, but the list of US scientists that worked on the bomb and also frequently visited Israel is quite long.
You indicate that “The French reportedly shipped reprocessed plutonium back to Israel as part of their repayment for Israeli scientific help.'” and this too is probably true. But for this to be of any value, Israel needed a neutron starter like beryllium and Polonium and a real implosion design with multiple layered explosive lenses, and nuclear triggers for the explosives. Not likely without U.S. design help. Plus how many nuclear physics and engineering majors left the US for India, Iran and Pakistan. Even if we did not supply the specific design, we educated the Phds that did. Under the previous shah of Iran, we educated 13 Iranian nuclear engineers, and 6 went home.
And the Cuban Missile Crisis you mention is exactly the same issue – We want our friends to have the bomb, but not any political or economic un-friendly’s like Cuba. Anyway, the Russians were not giving the Cubans a nuclear capability, just using Cuba as a platform to launch in close proximity to the US. The Russians were pissed that we did not remove our ICBMS from Turkey as promised – Kennedy finally did (implied) as part of the Cuban missile crisis settlement.
But I digress, the point I was trying to makes is that Israel has the bomb. India and Pakistan have bombs. Iran would be foolish not to try and develop its own nuclear capability. Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is still the U.S. primary nuclear strategy.
