Take it as a given that Israel’s nuclear weapons stockpile and its half dozen nuclear facilities in the country are targets for U.S. espionage — be it from the the SIGINT satellites tasked by the National Security Agency to the imagery satelittes run by the National Reconaissance Office. At the Pentagon’s Ballistic Missile Defense Agency, Nozette ran a program that focused on dual-use nuclear compliance monitoring satellites. The Clementine satellite that discovered water on the moon was, before it was used by civilian scientists, a platform for a sohpisticated nuclear compliance sensor. Among the technologies that Clementine validated was a capacity to peer beneath the ground — one of the ways that hidden water was discovered.
No doubt that Nozette would be in a good position to know how easily it is for U.S. technologies to pierce the veil of Israel’s secret nuke program.
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