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Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small town near Pittsburgh, hides a dark nuclear secret. In March 1976, General Brent Scowcroft was summoned to an emergency meeting where Marcus Roudin, head of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), warned that some younger nuclear staff were about to spill the beans about an American scandal tied to an Apollo company called Numec (Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation). The CIA had briefed the NRC that Apollo was the source of highly enriched uranium used in Israel’s nuclear weapons program. The room confirmed the CIA’s conclusion, and a forty-year cover-up followed, ostensibly to avoid hurting Israel’s feelings.
Numec processed nuclear material in Apollo. In 1965, a White House memo and a 1966 AEC report disclosed that more than 200 pounds of highly enriched uranium were missing, totaling north of 178 kilograms (close to 400 pounds). This was a national security alarm: someone had stolen 400 pounds of America’s most precious material. The missing uranium raised the question of whether it could have ended up in Israel’s bomb program. Was this an accounting error or something more?
The real question: did bomb-grade uranium disappear from an American plant and wind up in Israel? The FBI, CIA, and Congress investigated, and the GAO reviewed the matter, but the case remained unresolved. Across investigations, officials could not fully account for the material in Apollo. Some high-level officials believed Israel had obtained it and concealed it.
Zalman Shapiro, Numec’s founder and president, was not a minor figure. He had worked on the USS Nautilus reactor program and fuel development, and he was a noted supporter of Israel. FBI documents show Shapiro had frequent contacts with Israeli officials, including a science attaché believed to be an intelligence officer, and he had close ties with leaders in Israel’s government and its nuclear program. Shapiro hosted four Israeli intelligence officers at the Apollo plant in 1968, one of whom was Mossad agent Rafael Eitan, who later ran Jonathan Pollard’s spying operation in the U.S. for Israel. Eitan’s presence in Apollo is documented, along with other visitors connected to the Israeli embassy and Masad.
Shapiro’s legal team later claimed the investigation was due to his fondness for Israel. The FBI noted the visitors’ roles, and the CIA’s Carl Duckett briefed NRC officials that the CIA believed the missing uranium ended up in Israel. The Ford and Carter administrations faced political and diplomatic concerns about public knowledge of Israeli involvement, and there were discussions of surveillance, which J. Edgar Hoover reportedly refused. The Brzezinski memo from 1977 noted that the AEC did not require annual physical inventories in the 1950s and 60s, and Newmick’s inventory practices were particularly deficient, with no physical inventory between 1957 and 1965.
There are claims of environmental samples from 1968 pointing to Israel via a signature linked to Portsmouth, Ohio, where Pneumoc sourced uranium. Much of the truth remains classified, and the GAO was denied access to CIA and FBI documents. The public never received a full transparent investigation. The story also ties to local consequences: Apollo and nearby Parks Township host a 44-acre shallow-land disposal site with 10 trenches of contaminated waste, a remnant of uranium processing.
In sum, there were massive nuclear discrepancies, extraordinary Israeli access to Numec, Mossad involvement, and years of secrecy driven by political concerns about Israel’s reputation, leaving the case shrouded in classified materials and unresolved publicly.