Secret documents .. How did Israel circumvent America to build a nuclear reactor?

American documents – recently that secreted it – revealed how Israel has developed its nuclear capabilities in the 1960s, by circumventing Tel Aviv on American inspectors, and advancing towards building the nuclear reactor in Dimouna in the Negev desert with the help of France and without the flag of Washington.

The first Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion initiated the launch of the nuclear project in the second half of the fifties of the twentieth century, and after a decade, and on the eve of the 1967 war, Israel collected its first nuclear devices in secret.

From the beginning, the leaders of Israel viewed the Dimouna project as a “secret within a secret”; The first was represented by the Israeli -French nuclear agreement in 1957, which led to the establishment of the nuclear complex. The two countries have been negotiated in secret due to the sensitivity of the issue, according to the investigation of the “Zaman of Israel” website.

The National Security Archives at George Washington University in January published a new electronic volume that included 20 documents on the Israel nuclear project, which spoke about the extent of the American government’s knowledge of its secrets, and the methods adopted by Tel Aviv to obtain nuclear weapons by circumventing Washington.

Also, the new publications of the archive included full reports on visits in 1965 and 1966, along with a preliminary report in 1967, and during this period Israel has achieved great achievements in the nuclear field.

According to the documents reviewed by the Israeli website, there was a “deeper secret” represented by the 6 -storey underground fuel processing facility, which allowed the production of righteous plutonium for use in making weapons in complete secrecy.

The documents, which the Israeli website reviewed, indicates that when America discovered the “Dimouna Project” in the last months of 1960, it was not aware of the existence of a underground nuclear fuel processing facility, as only a few Israelis and French knew about it.

The internal discussions in America focused on evaluating the nature and objectives of the project, whether it is the production of plutonium, electricity generation, or research. Although some in Washington were initially suspected that the project was aimed at producing nuclear weapons, they were unable to prove this, there was no “damaged evidence” that the Dimouna reactor was devoted to the production of nuclear weapons.

The mystery was evident in the first special national intelligence assessment of Dimouna issued by the CIA on December 8, 1960.

The secret report did not explain how the committee concluded this, but just mentioned the existence of a plutonium separation facility, indicating that the purpose of the Dimouna reactor was not nuclear search, but the production of weapons.

Perhaps this secret document is the first or only American intelligence report that explicitly stipulates that the French -Israeli project included from the beginning the main technological components of the nuclear weapons program, a production reactor and an facility for the separation of plutonium.

Although the administration of US President Dwight Eisenhower posed difficult questions to Israel about the project’s goals, but the reason why this knowledge does not appear in subsequent intelligence reports remains a mystery.

In a speech to the Knesset on December 21, 1960, in response to American pressure, Ben Gurion officially announced the existence of a Dimouna reactor, but he insisted that it was “my research for industrial, agricultural, scientific and medical purposes.”

However, the intelligence assessments raised doubts by the Eisenhower administration, and its public statements reflected her surprise at the discovery of the Dimouna reactor, where Ben Gurion denied their endeavor to possess nuclear weapons, and he angrily said to the American ambassador, they created Reid, “We are not affiliated with America and we will never be so.”

Israel used Ben Gurion’s speech for years with every visit of the American inspectors to Dimouna, the first of which was in 1961.

And she occupied to persuade the inspectors that its goal was to build a nuclear facility for the production of electricity, and made a wide deception campaign through which the underground separation facility, and additional components on the site.

The Americans between 1961 and 1969 conducted eight inspections in Dimouna, most of them under pressure from US President John Kennedy, and aimed to transfer political messages and access the technological information that Washington is unaware of.

The problem of separating Plutonium was a major concern, and the American team warned that Israel might be able, within 18 months or less than the collection of a separation facility, and the conversion of Dimouna from a research reactor into an arms production facility.

In 1965, Israel completed the construction of the underground separation facility, and a year later it began to produce a good plutonium to make weapons, and on the eve of the 1967 war, it collected its first nuclear devices.

A report issued by the State Department’s Intelligence and Research Office revealed on March 9, 1967 that Israel has already completed the construction of the Plutonium separation facility, and that “Dimouna” is working at full capacity for the purposes of arms production, and that Tel Aviv is able to collect a nuclear weapon within six to eight weeks. (Al -Jazeera Net)