Ivana Hughes

We clean it up and we move on.

The plutonium, in fact...

The plutonium has been deposited globally, and we actually have an understanding that hundreds of years from now, hopefully, there will be scientists who study the planet who will say, oh, look, this is when they tested nuclear weapons.

Here's the plutonium line in the geologic record.

Yeah, I think Israel was really avoiding any sort of oversight by the... President Kennedy thought that proliferation of nuclear weapons was incredibly dangerous.

He was definitely concerned and didn't want other countries acquiring nuclear weapons.

This eventually led, even after his death,

to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, whose goal was that, but there are other goals, and I can talk about them as well.

In the case of Israel, he felt very strongly that if this was our ally, you know, and we were going to tell the rest of the world not to acquire nuclear weapons, we also had to actually, you know,

do what we were preaching and sort of be consistent in our approach to Israeli nuclear weapons.

But they went ahead and, I mean, I think it's thought that the first functional Israeli nuclear weapon was developed in 1966, right?

And so this was actually, interestingly, before the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty came together.

It was negotiated over a long period of time, but finally kind of signed.

In 1968, and then it entered into force in 1970.

It's still currently one of the largest international agreements amongst states in the United Nations.

So that treaty recognizes five nuclear weapons states.

They're U.S., Russia, United Kingdom, France, and China.

Those are the five that had nuclear weapons up to that point, declared nuclear weapons arsenals.

Again, Israel had actually begun its program.

At this point, Israel is thought to have 90 nuclear warheads already.