Earlier this month, 30 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to the Trump administration with a remarkable request: to publicly acknowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons.

Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear-armed state in the Middle East. But unlike other nuclear powers, Israel has never officially acknowledged its arsenal.

That nuclear policy is known, in Hebrew, as “amimut” or opacity. And for decades the United States has largely gone along with it. 

Today, historian Avner Cohen, author of ‘Israel and the Bomb’, joins us to explain how Israel built its nuclear program in secret, and why that silence still matters today.

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