Did hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium vanish from a small Pennsylvania town?

Countries & Cities · Published 15 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Between 1957 and 1978, a nuclear fuel plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, lost track of over 300 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Despite decades of investigations by the FBI, CIA, and other agencies, the fate of this material remains a mystery, fueling persistent suspicions of a covert diversion to Israel.

The Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, was founded by Dr. Zalman Mordecai Shapiro, a chemist who previously contributed to the development of the reactor for the USS Nautilus. The Apollo plant began manufacturing reactor fuel in 1959, eventually processing vast quantities of uranium. By 1966, the Atomic Energy Commission confirmed a deficit of 178 kilograms of U-235, the primary ingredient for nuclear weapons. This figure grew to 269 kilograms within three years, and by the time the plant was decommissioned, more than 330 kilograms remained unaccounted for.

The investigation into these losses spanned four presidential administrations and involved nearly every major U.S. intelligence and regulatory agency. Suspicions centered on whether the material was diverted to Israel’s nuclear weapons program, a theory bolstered by Shapiro’s known collaborations with Israeli officials and intelligence agencies like Mossad. One former employee even claimed to have witnessed armed strangers loading canisters of uranium onto a truck bound for a ship destined for Israel in 1965. However, no definitive proof of diversion was ever established, and no criminal charges were filed.

Alternative explanations suggest the missing uranium was lost to mundane industrial inefficiencies. Some investigators and authors have argued that the material was likely dispersed into the local environment or remained trapped within the plant’s own infrastructure, such as ventilation ducts and flooring. Even after the plant was sold to Babcock and Wilcox, Inc., further losses were recorded. To this day, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission maintains that it cannot unequivocally conclude whether the material was diverted or simply lost to undocumented processing mechanisms, leaving the Apollo affair as a lingering cold case in the history of nuclear security.

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