Castro’s letter represents the most significant congressional challenge to American silence on Israel’s nuclear program in decades. Yet buried beneath that silence lies a scandal that stretches back to the early Cold War—one involving a small Pennsylvania town, a team of Israeli spies, and the largest loss of weapons-grade uranium in American history.
The trail begins in the small borough of Apollo, Pennsylvania, roughly 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, where the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) processed approximately 17 metric tons of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium (HEU) for the United States government between 1957 and 1978. By the time investigators finished their work, more than 337 kilograms of that material had vanished—enough fissile material to construct multiple nuclear weapons. The CIA concluded that the missing uranium ended up in Israel’s nuclear arsenal. Yet no one was ever prosecuted, and the story has been systematically suppressed for over half a century.
To this day, the NUMEC affair remains unresolved. Key CIA and FBI files are still classified or heavily redacted. No criminal charges were ever filed against anyone, and Zalman Shapiro died in 2016 at age 96. Roger Mattson, who spent decades investigating the affair, put it simply in a public lecture: “My conclusion is the material went there [Israel].”
The Apollo Affair stands as a cautionary tale of how American foreign policy can be corrupted from within, how institutional silence becomes its own form of complicity, and how the most documented case of nuclear diversion in American history was buried by the very officials charged with preventing it. It is yet another indication that the first loyalty of many American Jews is to Israel, not America. Rep. Castro’s May 2026 letter represents a rare attempt to pierce the silence that has surrounded these events, but the precedents established over six decades of official denial remain formidable obstacles to the transparency he seeks.
NUMEC was never an accounting error, but rather a clear-cut act of espionage that our leaders chose to ignore. This pattern of complicity continues because our political establishment is trapped beneath the weight of an unshakeable Jewish supremacist power structure.
