FOIAWEAR — ISRAEL'S BOMB / The 1960 Estimate That Saw It Coming Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 070

ISRAEL'S BOMB — in 1960, before Dimona had a reactor core and two years before the memorandum that dated it, an intelligence assessment worked through the question that has never gone away: “Implications of the Acquisition by Israel of a Nuclear Weapons Capability.”

It is not a technical paper. It is an attempt to predict what a country would do once it had one, and it starts from the psychological effect: “Nevertheless, possession of a nuclear weapon capability, or even the prospect of achieving it, would clearly give Israel a greater sense of security, self-confidence, and assertiveness.”

It expects the declaratory policy to run in one direction and the posture in another. On announcements: “In any public announcement concerning their nuclear reactor program, the Israelis would almost certainly stress the peaceful nature of their efforts, but they would also, as time goes on, make plain that henceforth Israel is a power to be accorded more respect than either its friends or its enemies have hitherto given it.”

And then the sentence this shirt is about: “As Israel approached the achievement of a nuclear weapon capability, for example, it probably would make it increasingly clear that an Arab attack on Israel would be met with nuclear retaliation.”

The paper is equally clear about the diplomatic consequence — that the capability would be used to end the argument over everything else: Israel “would emphasize that Arab hopes of solving the Palestine problem by boycott, blockade, and military means were now unrealistic and that the Arabs had no recourse but to negotiate with Israel for a peaceful settlement.”

It was written when the outcome was genuinely in doubt. That is the whole reason to print it.

The artwork is the prospect drawn as a technical plate: a domed reactor under a gantry crane, a cooling tower, a re-entry vehicle nose cone on its trolley, a radiation trefoil, an ore drum and a cable truck — separate objects on bare ground. No faces and no mushroom cloud are depicted.

The QR code on the front opens the source: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0005796843 — the released 1960 assessment. Every quotation above is from it.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717, 6.1 oz garment-dyed cotton, S–4XL. Front print only; plain back. Artwork approximately 6.9 × 4.6 in, QR approximately 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Colours: the drawing is warm cream and amber on Black, Graphite, Espresso and Navy, and the same plate struck as a dark ink drawing on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green and Chambray.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, tumble dry low. Do not iron the print directly.

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