JFK and Dimona’s History of Nuclear Weapons
Renee Parsons
Few Americans appear to have noticed that there was an unusual lack observance of the November 22nd assassination of JFK, the first absence in the US when no annual remembrance occurred.
Instead, the country’s values since 1963 to honor the abbreviated Presidency of JFK were disregarded as the anti-semitism movement took center stage. The anti semitic mantra has stepped in creating a geopolitical consciousness as if intent on radicalizing a First Amendment violation.
As President and a combat veteran of WW II, Kennedy was a man ahead of his time in support of nuclear non-proliferation as a foundation for global peace amid rising tensions around the world. Even newly elected, Kennedy showed an ability to accomplish his objectives with a special wit, an inner strength of personal and political gravitas while exuding the essential spark of a natural born leader respectful of his power, his authority and his force of personality.
Not surprisingly, Kennedy’s replacements over the years have mostly been ordinary placeholders who never achieved the same level of praise or intellectual depth or an ability to understand the true nature of international politics and global governance.
It should come as no surprise that the late President is currently considered to have been the last great US President of individual distinction to be elected. JFK may have been the last US President to attend weekly Church service.
The historical record indicates that JFK visited Palestine twice (1931 and 1939) confirmed his distress as President about the future of Palestinian refugees when the UN rejected its plan to take custody of Arab land within Palestine as protection from Israel usurpation. Israel rejected the notion of ‘free choice’ for Palestine.
Within the Kennedy Library exists a Kennedy letter (May, 1961) regarding Palestinian refugees with responses from the Presidents of Egypt and Lebanon and the Kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
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More than sixty years after the heinous deed, the JFK mystery remains with the uncertainty that there was more than just CIA involvement.
The night before the 1960 inauguration, JFK met with outgoing President Eisenhower and his Secretary of State who briefed him on their concerns about Dimona, Isreal’s covert nuclear plant which had begun clandestine construction in 1958 with France providing the necessary components.
Immediately after his inauguration, Kennedy was already aware of technical details related to nuclear plants and how it could easily be converted into a production facility while being espoused as a benign research facility.
Expecting a thorough scientific explanation from Israel whether Dimona was capable of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel into weapons grade plutonium, AEC scientists were limited to superficial visits. The US requested official opportunities to inspect Dimona as Israel stalled which sharpened Kennedy’s instincts that the Dimona agenda was about more than providing electricity.
Relying on an intuitive awareness, JFK immediately understood the possibility that if Dimona’s intent was merely to provide energy, why was its existence concealed. What was especially alarming was that while Israel resisted IAEA inspections, there was a tacit corroboration that Dimona could be used to reprocess spent uranium fuel into weapons grade plutonium, one step away from nuclear weapons.
By 1963, despite two years of Kennedy Administration questions on Dimona, communications between Israel’s Founder and Prime Minister David Ben Gurion escalated Kennedy’s frustration at being continually delayed from conducting a full technical inspection of Dimona after months of Israeli procrastination:
Ben-Gurion’s tacit acknowledgement of a nuclear weapons potential and a suggestion of freedom of action about eventual reprocessing. The Israeli minutes of the conversation reveal Ben-Gurion’s ambiguities and evasiveness with his assertion that “for the time being, the only purposes of [the Dimona reactor] are for peace.” He added, “we will see what happens in the Middle East.”
JFK to Ben-Gurion (May 18, 1963):
“These visits should be of a nature and frequency to enable us to be confident that Dimona is not being used for weapons production purposes… This matter is so important to the United States that I must repeat with emphasis the great importance we attach to a fully satisfactory inspection arrangement at Dimona.”
Ben-Gurion’s reply (May 27, 1963):
“The Dimona project is a purely peaceful enterprise… There is no intention to develop weapons capability at the center. The visits of your scientists are welcome, and we shall do our best to cooperate.”
By July 4, 1963, Ben Gurion unexpectedly resigned.
On July 5, 1963, Kennedy contacted new Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol
“It is essential that I have your assurance that American Government representatives will be permitted to visit Dimona… at intervals of six months… In the absence of such assurance, the U.S. Government’s commitment to Israel could be seriously jeopardized.” Kennedy was requesting information regarding “fuel fabrication facilities or plutonium separation plant and that sufficient time be allowed for a thorough examination.”
By November 22, 1963, Kennedy had been murdered and to date, Israel still maintains an ambiguous posture refusing to acknowledge its secret supply of nuclear weapons.
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In addition, it is worth recalling that Kennedy’s DOJ had repeatedly ordered Isreal and its powerful American Zionist Council to register under FARA Foreign Agent Registration Act (1938), a law designed to prevent covert foreign influence in US policy. AZC was a lobbying organization coordinating pro-Israel activities in the U.S., funded directly by the Israeli government with an interest in subverting the American government as a tool for Israel.
AZC ultimately morphed into AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee which currently dominates the weak-willed US Congress as AIPAC avoided the foreign agent label restructuring itself as an independent American lobbying group.
Failure to adhere to FARA provides for a criminal fine and enforcement with a temporary restraining order issued enjoining such agent from further participation as a foreign agent principal. The FARA efforts died with JFK’s assassination.
Today, more than sixty years later, Israel still refuses to abide by FARA which requires agents of foreign principals engaged in political activities to make public disclosure of their relationship as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. Such registration would have severely limited the Council’s lobbying activities, its dominance of Congress and exposed its financial ties to Tel Aviv. Today, the Trump Administration is almost totally controlled by Israeli Zionists.
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It may be recalled that during his first term, President Trump had promised to release the complete CIA files on JFK. Since 1963, it had been widely assumed that the CIA was solely responsible for the assassination although there remained a curious lack of confirmation that murder of the President was totally a CIA operation.
By the end of Trump’s first administration, Judge Napolitano reminded the President of his promise as Trump responded with an intriguing remark – ‘If you could see what is in those files, you would not want to release them either.”
The logical conclusion here is that Trump himself had seen the contents of the CIA’s JFK assassination file which presumably contains never-before released intelligence regarding participants in the JFK murder. To whom else could Trump be referring besides the CIA itself? What other identity might Trump desire to protect, perhaps some entity necessary to be shielded from public disclosure.
Given Trump’s unparalleled support for Israel and a very close relationship with Israel Premier Netanyahu as well as his silence on the genocide in Gaza, is there reason to believe Trump will ever order the full release of all CIA documents regarding JFK’s assassination?
Post Script: Entitled the Nuclear Vault – The National Security Archives – Nuclear Documentation Project
“A recently declassified Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee from December 1960 is the first and only known U.S. intelligence report to correctly and unequivocally state that Israel’s Dimona nuclear project would include a reprocessing plant for plutonium production and was weapons related. Subsequent U.S. intelligence products treated the reprocessing issue as unsettled until the late 1960s (after JFK’s assassination), when Israel reached the threshold of a nuclear weapons capability and the U.S. and Israel reached a secret agreement to accommodate its status as an undeclared nuclear power.”
Newly identified documents indicate that immediately after Kennedy’s assassination, Israel purchased 80-100 tons of uranium oxide (yellow cake) from Argentina (1963-1964) for its weapons program.
In addition, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) reports on Israel’s ease of nuclear weapon deployment.
Renee Parsons has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and a staff member in the US House of Representative in Washington, DC. Before its demise, she was also a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter.