The Israeli Nuclear Arsenal: Let's dig up the dirt! (2)

 As I promised in an earlier post, I'm posting the second news story based on Mordechai Vanunu's testimony and published in the Sunday Times on October 5th, 1986.

The Sunday Times
Insight: Inside Dimona, Israel's nuclear bomb factory

Date: October 5, 1986

EVERY day at 7am a fleet of 40 blue and white Volvo buses speeds down the desert highway that cuts through the Negev desert. Nine miles out from the town of Dimona, the buses turn right into a side road and pull up after half a mile at an army checkpoint. Soldiers make a cursory inspection of security passes and the buses are waved through. Two miles further into the desert, they stop at another Halt sign, where security is more severely enforced.

Here an electrified fence extends into the dusty scrubland of the Negev. It surrounds Israel's most secret establishment. The sand within the perimeter is raked by tractor to betray intruder's footprints to the infantry and helicopter patrols. Observation posts are mounted on the hilltops nearby. Missile batteries have orders to shoot down any aircraft that stray into the airspace above, as one Israeli pilot discovered to his cost in 1967.

Officially, Dimona is run by the Israeli Atomic Energy Authority to conduct experiments into nuclear power. Its official title is Kirya-le-Mehekar Gariny or KMG - the Negev Nuclear Research Centre. The world knows it as Dimona, long considered to be Israel's nuclear bomb factory.

Dimona is a palm and concrete oasis reached from the Beersheba to Sodom highway. The road is the closest anyone can get without a security pass. The handful of photographers who have evaded the patrols and succeeded in snatching a hazy shot from a speeding car charge exorbitant reproduction fees for their rare pictures.

The Volvo buses travel the route three times a day to service the 7.30am, 3.30pm and 11.30pm shifts. They carry 2,700 scientists, technicians and administrative staff. Secrecy demands that many people remain unaware of the duties performed within by even long-standing colleagues. The penalty for loose talk is 15 years imprisonment.

Once off the buses, the workforce disperses to various machons, which are self-contained production units.

There are 10 machons in all. Machon 1 is the nuclear reactor itself, a silver-domed building 60ft in diameter. Machon 4 is where radioactive waste is immersed in tar and packed in drums to be sunk in the desert. But only a handful - 150 workers in all - are ever allowed to pass through the doors of the real secret within Dimona - Machon 2.

Outwardly, it is a crudely built and windowless concrete building, two storeys high - 80ft by 200ft - an apparently little-used warehouse and office block. Two details suggest otherwise: the walls are thickened to withstand bombardment and there is an elevator tower on the roof which seems unnecessary for such a small building.

For three decades this innocuous slab of concrete has hidden Israel's secrets from prying satelites and foreign nuclear energy inspectors. Above ground level the entire site is precisely what the Israelis say it is: an experimental nuclear power station. Intelligence agencies, scientists and journalists have attempted for many years to prove otherwise. But all have fallen down on one key question: Where is the technology that can transform the peaceful atomic research into a bomb factory? Machon 2 provides the answer.

False walls on the first floor above ground hide the service lifts that take men and materials to six subterranean levels, where the components of nuclear weapons are produced and machined into warhead parts.

IT WAS to Machon 2 that Mordechai Vanunu was first assigned in 1977. He is a 31-year-old Moroccan Jew, born on October 13, 1954, in Marrakesh, where his parents ran a small shop. In 1963, amidst increasingly anti-Jewish feeling, the family emigrated to Israel and settled in Beersheba. After three years conscription in the Israeli army, reaching the rank of first sergeant in a unit of sappers on the Golan Heights, Vanunu entered Ramat Aviv University in Tel Aviv. But he failed two exams after the first year of his physics degree course and returned home.

In mid-summer of 1976, he saw advertisements for trainee technicians at Dimona and, by chance, met a friend who was already employed by KMG. Vanunu collected an application form from the KMG offices in Beersheba, near the bus station on the main road to Tel Aviv.

His first interview was with security. Vanunu was asked about criminal offences, drug or alcohol problems and his political affiliations. A month later he received a letter of acceptance.

He went on the KMG payroll in November, 1976, by coincidence the same month that 13 American senators on a fact-finding visit to Israel were refused entry to Dimona. Vanunu was not taken out to the desert complex straightaway. Instead he was sent back to school for a crash course in physics, chemistry, maths and English. He sailed through the initial entrance exam along with 39 of his 45 fellow candidates in January, 1977. In early February, Vanunu's intake boarded a Volvo bus for Dimona.

They were taken to a school on the site where their first duty was to sign the Israeli Official Secrets Act. Then he was given his security pass, number 9657-8, medically assessed to be fit and further schooled, under the auspices of a headmaster called Parahi, in elementary nuclear physics and nuclear chemistry with the emphasis on plutonium, uranium and radioactivity.

Vanunu was then given a further pass number, 320, for entry to Machon 2, and a locker (No. 3). The new intake were given 10 weeks to familiarise themselves with Machon 2. At the end of June, their initial training complete, they celebrated with a party.

There was one hiccup at this point. Vanunu was called up for a month's army-reserve duty with his engineer unit, but this seems to have been a mistake. When the nature of his job was discovered he was quickly released. Within seven days he was back in Machon 2, to be told that, after passing a final test, he would be working on the night shift, 11.30pm to 8am.

Vanunu satisfied a threeman examination board (an independent engineer, one of the Dimona school lecturers, and a specialist in handling radio-active materials). On August 7, 1977, he reported for his first full day's work as a menahil - a controller on the night shift. It was the start of a nine-year stint as a nuclear technician which was to take Vanunu throughout the labyrinthine Machon 2.

DIMONA was secretly built by France between 1957 and 1964. It was originally claimed to be a textiles plant by Israel. When, in 1960, an American U2 spyplane photographed it for the first time, the incoming president, John F Kennedy forced the then Isreli prime minister, David Ben Gurion, to submit to regular inspections by US scientists to ensure that Dimona's true purpose remained peaceful nuclear research. Those visits gave Kennedy's successor, Lyndon B Johnson, sufficient assurance to publicly declare that Dimona really was a civilian reactor.

President de Gaulle added his reassurance, saying that France had stopped short of supplying the technology that could have transformed Dimona into a plant 'from which, one day, atomic weapons could emerge. '

But the official claims have never been accepted. It has long been suspected, but never publicly confirmed, that Israel has been using Dimona to produce materials for a simple atomic weapon. But the many speculative attempts to lift the curtain around Dimona have always foundered. Invariably based on the testimony of unidentified sources, they failed to explain how Israel obtains the fissile material needed for nuclear weapons.

Atomic bombs are made either from Uranium 235 or plutonium. But the production of Uranium 235 requires a huge gaseous diffusion plant or a large number of gas centrifuges. Plutonium, however, can be produced in a compact separation plant.

Plutonium is a by-product of the nuclear process, which in some types of reactor, like the one at Dimona, has to be separated from the uranium fuel rods after they have spent a period in the reactor core. In sophisticated weapons design, just 2 1/2 kilograms of plutonium is enough to build a bomb.

France has always insisted that it had stopped short of supplying Israel with plutonium separation technology, which is thought to be the preserve of the major nuclear powers: America, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and more recently China. So most experts concluded that Israel, through the expertise and innovation of its scientists, had managed to extract only small amounts of plutonium using less efficient processes.

Inspections ended in 1969 after American scientists complained of uncooperative Israeli authorities. But they never saw any evidence to suggest that Dimona housed the plutonium separation plant necessary to turn an ordinary research project into a significant atomic bomb factory.

At best, the CIA and the United Nations have concluded, Israel may have stockpiled enough plutonium in the past 22 years to build perhaps 10 but certainly no more than 20 primitive atomic bombs similar to the 20 kiloton device dropped on Nagasaki in 1945. That estimate is based on the greatest amount of plutonium that can possibly be extracted without the aid of sophisticated separation technology.The general view has been that, while Israel does have an atomic weapons programme, it is still of a rudimentary nature. Similar suspicions are harboured against several other nations, including Argentina, Pakistan, India and South Africa.

However, Mordechai Vanunu's testimony, which has been checked with leading nuclear experts on both sides of the Atlantic, shows that one of the world's worst kept secrets is, in fact, one of the best kept confidences of the century. Far from being a nuclear pigmy, the evidence is that Israel must now be regarded a major nuclear power, ranking sixth in the atomic league table, with a stockpile of at least 100 nuclear weapons and with the components and ability to build atomic, neutron or hydrogen bombs.

WHEN French construction workers first bulldozed the desert scrub in 1957, they began excavating a crater 80ft deep in the sand. In it they buried Machon 2, the six-level concrete bunker, which was topped off with the two innocuous floors above ground. The false walls were built to hide the service lifts to the subterranean floors from the American inspectors. When the shell was complete, French engineers and technicians installed the technology de Gaulle claimed to have denied Israel. Vanunu's older workmates at Dimona fondly related stories of the Frenchmen who worked alongside them.

The six underground floors of Machon 2 are divided into numbered production units. There is also a demonstration room where visiting VIPs, confined only to the prime minister, the defence minister and the military top brass, are briefed on Operation Hump. That is the codename, says Vanunu, that Israel has given its latest bomb design programme.

In this room are boxed models of atomic devices and a wall-mounted floor plan of Machon 2. Workers are generally free to roam the plant during the long, tedious shifts. Vanunu regularly escaped the constant rounds of canasta played by his workmates to see what was going on.

He worked in, or visited, 33 production units in Machon 2. Unit 10, a ground floor, drive-in delivery bay received the trucks carrying the 100 large and 40 smaller fuel rods from the reactor core. A crane lowers the rods in baskets down through Level One which is a service floor, through Level Two which mainly houses the control room for the plant, to Unit 11 on Level Three.

Here the uranium fuel rods containing the plutonium by-product are chemically stripped of their aluminum coating. When stripped the uranium weighs 650 kilograms and is immersed in nitric acid. This is heated to 109 degrees centigrade for 30 hours to dissolve the uranium.

At this point the uranium content is 450 grams per litre and is transferred through pipes by vacuum to Units 12 to 22, the main treatment centre. This is so big that it occupies a huge production hall rising from Level Four to Level Two. During this process the liquid is treated to remove radioactivity and a mix of solvent and water is added. It is at this point that the plutonium, which mixes with the water, is separated from the uranium, which mixes with the solvent. By the time the mixture is pumped out of the main treatment centre it contains 300 miligrams of plutonium per litre.

In Unit 31 the liquid is further concentrated to two grams per litre and sent to Unit 33, where it is piped into 20-litre tanks and heated with, among other chemicals, hydrogen peroxide for four hours. After an eight-hour cooling period it is mixed with other chemicals which cause the powder to gather in lumps. This is drained and dried, leaving a 'cake' of plutonium, which is baked in Unit 37.

The baking process concentrates the metal into a solid button weighing 130 grams. Nine buttons of plutonium were produced each week, 1.17 kilograms a week for the 34 weeks a year that the process ran (It shut down for four months for repairs and maintenance). The annual net result of this separation process is around 40 kilograms of plutonium a year, or nearly six times the most optimistic assessments of Israel's plutonium making capabilities.
In addition, further units were added between 1980-2, built and installed by the Israelis alongside the plutonium separation plant and monitored from the same control room. One of them, Unit 93 on Level Four, produces tritium. This is of immense significance, for it means Israel has the potential to produce thermonuclear weapons far more powerful than ordinary atomic bombs.

Sticks of lithium and aluminium radiated in the reactor produce the tritium as a by product. Heated in Unit 93 to 625 degrees centigrade, the sticks melt. Tritium is extracted.

In Unit 95, built alongside the three-storey main treatment plant in a disused lift shaft, lithium 6 was separated from commercially available lithium, producing 180 grams a day. Unit 98 is a deuterium production plant.

All of these components, plutonium, lithium 6, tritium and deuterium are taken to another section on Level Four code named MM2, or Metallurgy, Machon 2. It is here that the raw materials are machined into the components of nuclear bombs.

THE processes described above are a simplified precis of the detailed descriptions, flow rates, measures, temperatures and other scientific data that Vanunu, from his position in the control room and work in other units, was able to memorise over nine years and pass on to The Sunday Times Insight team, which in turn checked them out with nuclear scientists.

Vanunu never claimed to have seen a completed bomb and never claimed any special knowledge of precisely what the components were. He says the components were taken out of Dimona at regular intervals in a guarded fleet of trucks and hire cars to an unknown location in Haifa.

Our extensive debriefings of Vanunu, over a period of four weeks, produced estimates that Israel was producing 40 kilograms of plutonium a year, enough to make 10 bombs a year. During the period Vanunu worked there Israel therefore produced enough plutonium for 100 nuclear bombs of at least 20 kilotons, equivalent to the one dropped on Nagasaki. By using sophisticated designs requiring smaller amounts of plutonium, it could have produced enough to make 200 nuclear bombs.

Moreover, the production of lithium 6, tritium and deuterium means that Israel is producing the raw materials to make the components used to boost the yield of primitive atomic weapons to 10 times the 20 kiloton yield.

Two pictures in particular appear to show a lithium deuteride hemisphere which could be used in the construction of the most devastating weapon of all - the thermonuclear bomb - a weapon capable of yielding the equivalent explosive force of hundreds of thousands of tons of TNT. In the chilling jargon of the nuclear bomb makers, Israel has moved beyond the ability to produce small 'suburb-busting' nuclear bombs to 'city-busters'.

THERE was one question that remained unanswered in Mordechai Vanunu's story. France built Israel a 26 megawatt reactor which can produce, at the outside, seven kilograms of plutonium a year. So how could Vanunu possibly report an annual amount of 40 kilograms?

His reference to 100 large and 40 small uranium fuel rods from the core and the subsequent amounts, in litres or grams produced in the separation processes, suggest a reactor of up to 150 megawatts - the right quantity to produce 40 kilograms a year.

Two events in the late 1960s explain the disparity. First, the Israel secret service, Mossad, masterminded the illegal acquisition of 200 tons of yellowcake - the raw material from which 123 tons of uranium fuel can be extracted - in late 1968 in an operation known as the Plumbat Affair.

Nobody has even been able to explain why Israel wanted so much. A 26 megawatt reactor requires only 20 tons of fuel a year. France had supplied the initial charge, Israel's own phosphate industry provided a further 10 tons a year and spent fuel was recycled to make new rods. So Dimona had more than enough uranium to fuel a 26 mw reactor.

A few months later Israel deliberately provoked the American scientists who inspected Dimona at intervals, harassing them to the point where they pulled out altogether. Since then no outside agency has been inside Dimona, thus leaving the Israelis free to upgrade their 26 megawatt core to 150 megawatts. British atomic energy scientists have confirmed that boosting Dimona's French reactor by a factor of five could have been achieved without rebuilding the reactor.

This is supported by evidence from France. Sources quoted in a recent book about French-Israeli nuclear co-operation said that the reactor built in the Negev had been far larger than admitted. THE sophistication and scale of Israel's nuclear weapons-making capabilities revealed by Insight makes it clear that Israel is now a major nuclear power. Its survival in the face of conventional defeat would seem assured, for no Arab nation could match its nuclear muscle.China has approximately 300 warheads, France 500 and Britain as many as 700. Both America and the USSR are in a class of their own with about 27,000 each. Israel's projected arsenal of 100-200 weapons may be dwarfed by comparison but it is enough to make it the sixth most powerful nation on earth.

Ten days ago the outgoing prime minister, Shimon Peres, attended a regular briefing of Israeli newspaper editors. On the agenda was the upcoming Sunday Times Insight investigation.

Though no editor will publicly reveal details of the conversation, it is believed that Peres, having told the editors of the forthcoming report, warned them of their obligations under the Official Secrets Act. He admitted that Insight had gained access to an inside source.

A third news story will follow soon revealing how nuclear weapons experts from all around the world were convinced to work for the Zionists.