Decades ago I spent three years writing The Samson Option (1991), an exposé of the unstated policy of American presidents going back to Dwight Eisenhower to look the other way as Israel began the process of building an atomic bomb. The right or wrong for Israel, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, was not the point of the book. My point was that what America was doing was known throughout the Third World, as it was then called, and our duplicity made our worries about the spread of nuclear weapons another example of American hypocrisy. Since then others have undertaken...