The Zionist bomb
However, according to Vanunu's testimony, the station has the technology for annually producing 40 kilograms of plutonium, enough to build 10 bombs a year. Vanunu's testimony said that they had been convinced by this evidence and calculated that Israel has stockpiled at least 100 nuclear bombs.
MORDECHAI VANUNU, the Israeli engineer information for a feature in the September 5 issue of the British
Sunday Times on the Zionist state's nuclear arsenal, has been missing since September 30. A friend of his, the Australian pastor John
Macknight, has alleged from Jerusalem that Vanunu was kidnapped by Mossad, the notorious Israeli secret service, and is being held in that city. He has reported that a Jerusalem judge handed down a two-week detention order against the dissident engineer.
The US magazine News Week has also reported that Vanunu was kidnapped in Britain by the Mossad and taken back to Israel. The following article on Vanunu's revelations is taken from the October
8 issue of News from Within, a weekly bulletin in English published by human rights activists in Israel.
So it was that the Sunday Times report on the Dimona station created such a sensation. Based on information from a nuclear technician, the report puts Israel as the world's sixth most powerful nuclear power.
Mordechai Vanunu, who began working at the Dimona station nine years ago, appears to have lost his security clearance after becoming involved with left-wing groups at the
Beersheba University. Dismissed from his job at the station, unable to find another place of employment, Vanunu left the country.
According to the Sunday Times report, while working at the plant
Vanunu secretly drew plans, took photographs and familiarized himself who provided the with the bomb production process. Vanunu told the has been building weapons at Dimona for the past twenty years, its plutonium extraction process from satellites and independent inburying it beneath an innocuous, little-used building at the site." by France between 1957 and 1964. France has always insisted that it didn't supply Israel with the plutonium separation technology necessary for the production of atomic weapons. Most intelligence reports including those of the CIA and the UN) put Israel's nuclear stockpile at between 10-20 primitive atomic bombs, similar
French began constructing the Dimona
Station in 1957, they dug out a 25-metre-deep crater was then covered by a two-storey, innocent-looking, above ground struc-
Israel now a major nuclear power
The Sunday Times report carries a detailed description of the plutonium extraction process carried out at the station, concluding that "the sophistication and scale of Israel's nuclear weapons-making capabilities revealed by Insight [the team which debriefed Vanunu and examined his testimony] makes it clear that Israel is now a major nuclear power. Its survival in the face of a 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 nuclear 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 up. coming 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 access to an inside source, had gained Insight
Six days before the Sunday Times published Vanunu's testimony, both HaAretz and Al Hamishmar ran editorials on a Daily Mirror report which carried some of the information later released in the Sunday Times. Both editorials were completely censored.