About Israel Nuclear

 

 Israel is not a member of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT)
and is widely understood to be the first and only country in the Middle East to possess
nuclear weapons. Believing a nuclear weapons deterrent to be essential vis-à-vis
Israel's Arab adversaries, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion instituted a nuclear
weapons program in the mid-1950s as part of his "activist defense policy."[1] Consistent
with Prime Minister Levi Eshkol's declaration that "Israel will not be the first nation to
introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East," Tel Aviv maintains a policy of "nuclear
ambiguity," or "nuclear opacity," refraining from overt admissions that it possesses
nuclear weapons, nuclear tests, or threats to its adversaries that explicitly involve
nuclear weapons.[2] Israel has also made extensive efforts to deny other regional actors
the ability to acquire nuclear weapons, including air strikes against Iraq's Osiraq Reactor
in 1981 and Syria's suspected reactor near Al-Kibar in 2007.

 Ref: http://www.nti.org/e_research/profiles/israel/nuclear/index.html