Militaristic Israel's Nuclear Bomb Factory & Historic Secrecy--Part 1

During the 2008 election campaign both Democratic President-Elect Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of State-Designate Hillary Clinton expressed their concern that the U.S. imperialist version of “Peace in the Middle East” would be threatened if the Iranian government acquired nuclear weapons. Ironically, the Zionist movement’s militaristic Israeli government in the Middle East--which Obama & Clinton regard as a U.S. government ally—has already been producing nuclear weapons at its Dimona nuclear bomb factory for many years.

Perhaps because most people in the world believe that the Holy Land should be a nuclear-free zone, the Israeli government set up its Dimona Nuclear Bomb Factory operation covertly and continued to be secretive about its nuclear war preparations during the 1990s. According to the Oct. 20, 1991 issue of the New York Times, “journalists working in Israel’ in the 1990s were “not allowed to publish anything substantial on Israel’s nuclear program.”

The book None Will Survive Us: The Story of the Israeli A-Bomb by Ami Dor-On and Eli Teicher, for example, which was scheduled to be published in 1980 by the two Israeli journalists, “was banned from publication by Israeli government censors” and Dor-On and Teicher were “allegedly threatened with prison sentences of 15 years to life if they defy the ban,” according to the book Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal by Peter Pry.

In 1952, the Ben-Gurion government of Israel “secretly founded the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission [IAEC] and placed it under the supervision of the Defense Ministry,” according to Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal. “The architect of both the bomb factory at Dimona and the 30-year effort to keep it secret,” former Israeli Prime Minister [and now-Israeli President] Shimon Peres, was then director-general of the Israeli Defense Ministry and he persuaded the then-Prime Minister Ben-Gurion “to pursue the nuclear option,” according to Louis Toscano’s Triple Cross book.

In The Fall of 1956, according to The Undeclared Bomb by Leonard Spector, “France secretly agreed to supply Israel with a sizeable plutonioum-producing reactor to be built at Dimona.” The agreement between the French and Israeli government to construct the Dimona nuclear reactor was signed on Sept. 17, 1956; on Oct. 10, 1956, “further details” were “set forth in a classified accord,” and in November 1956, the French government made a “secret pledge to help Israel develop nuclear arms,” according to The Undeclared Bomb.

Following the secret French-Israeli government agreements of 1956, “hundreds of French technicians flooded the Negev to construct the facility, including a plutonium processing plant underground to elude American and Soviet spy satellites,” and “by 1967 Israel had enough plutonium on hand to build its first bomb,” according to Triple Cross. The same book also noted that “to explain the feverish construction activity in the Negev, Ben-Gurion announced Israel was building a textile plant”; and, after the U.S. government discovered that what was actually being built at Dimona was a nuclear reactor, “Peres claimed the power produced at Dimona would be used to desalinate billions of gallons of sea water for the irrigation of the Negev.” On Dec. 21, 1960, when then-Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion publicly acknowledged that a nuclear reactor—not a textile factory—was being built at Dimona, he had also “declared that the facility would be used exclusively for peaceful research and training,” according to The Undeclared Bomb. (end of part 1)

(Downtown 1/15/92)