Britain's dirty secret: how Britain helped Israel make the A-bomb in the 1960s by Meirion Jones

We can reveal that while Harold Wilson was prime minister the UK supplied Israel with small quantities of plutonium despite a warning from British intelligence that it might "make a material contribution to an Israeli weapons programme". This, by enabling Israel to study the properties of plutonium before its own supplies came on line, could have taken months off the time it needed to make a weapon. Britain also sold Israel a whole range of other exotic chemicals, including uranium-235, beryllium and lithium-6, which are used in atom bombs and even hydrogen bombs. And in Harold Macmillan's time we supplied the heavy water that allowed Israel to start up its own plutonium production facility at Dimona - heavy water that British intelligence estimated would enable Israel to make "six nuclear weapons a year".

After we exposed the sale of the heavy water on Newsnight last August, the government assured the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that all Britain did was sell some heavy water back to Norway. Using the Freedom of Information Act, we have now obtained previously top-secret papers which show not only that Norway was a mere cover for the Israel deal, but that Britain made hundreds of other secret shipments of nuclear materials to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.