US intelligence had predicted Indian nuclear bomb in 1964

The US intelligence community predicted India’s atomic bomb in 1964 but mistakenly concluded Israel had “not yet decided” to go nuclear, according to newly declassified documents.

The documents were released yesterday by the National Security Archive (NSA) and the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project.

Such an analysis came from the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) from October 1964, which had details about the nuclear state of play on a country-by-country level right at the time of the first Chinese atomic test on 16 October 1964.

The 1964 report said the “chances are better than even that India will decide to build nuclear weapons within the next few years.”

Although India had the capability to produce plutonium and the Chinese test was likely to produce increasing “internal pressures” for a decision, in fact it was years before India made a decision to produce nuclear weapons,” it said.

The estimate also concluded that Israeli leaders “probably have not yet decided to develop nuclear weapons,” although “strong pressures” to do so could emerge depending on such factors as armament levels of the Arab states or whether Israel was unable to acquire “adequate quantities of conventional weapons.”

“By contrast, Avner Cohen’s research (in his 1998 book Israel and the Bomb and his 2010 volume The Worst Kept Secret) demonstrates that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion had already taken the basic decisions to develop a nuclear weapons capability in 1962, and that the Israelis started to build their arsenal in 1967,” the National Security Archive said.

Interestingly, the 1964 NIE’s conclusion differed from an estimate a year earlier, which speculated that “the Israelis, unless deterred by outside pressure, will attempt to produce a nuclear weapon sometime in the next several years.”

The CIA produced the 1964 estimate, “Prospects for a Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons Over the Next Decade,” at a time of great concern whether the Chinese event would generate a wave of national nuclear capabilities.

The report also assesses the West German, Swedish, Japanese, and other national nuclear programmes.

This NIE appeared only days after the first Chinese nuclear test on 16 October 1964; it had been in the works for some months but the news of the test may have created some pressure to finalise the estimate because it includes a discussion of the implications of the test.

That India was the only state that the authors of the estimate thought likely to develop nuclear weapons helps explain why they reaffirmed the statements made in 1963 on nuclear proliferation about the “broad implications” of nuclear proliferation, for example, “there will not be a widespread proliferation ...over the next decade.”

COMMENT NOW