"I claim that I wanted to tell the world about what was happening. The fact is that he was brought to trial," Mr Peres said in a recent BBC interview.Ĭertainly he has done little to endear himself to the Israeli public - abandoning Judaism, appearing to endanger national security and jeopardising ties with Washington, Israel's greatest supporter.Īnd his 18 years incarceration - more than half of the time in solitary confinement - seems if anything to have sharpened his political views. He may have been hailed as a heroic whistle blower by the anti-nuclear camp outside Israel, which has campaigned doggedly on his behalf and even had him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but there have been few tears shed for him by Israelis.įormer Prime Minister Shimon Peres - who ordered his capture, reportedly on Italian soil so as not to embarrass the then-British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - expresses the prevailing view. He also recounted stories of how US experts allowed to inspect the site in the 1960s had been tricked by false walls and concealed lifts so they did not even realise the six underground floors at Machon 2 existed.īefore the Sunday Times had even printed its story, Mordechai Vanunu had been lured away from London and kidnapped in Rome in a much-publicised Mossad sting.ĭrugged and bound, he was shipped back home to face the full force of Israeli justice. Israel's estimated nuclear capability had to be revised from a handful of weapons to approximately 100-200 warheads, ranging from battlefield weapons to warheads that could lay waste whole cities. His information, which was verified by experts in the nuclear field, also indicated that Dimona was capable of producing much more weapons-grade plutonium than previously thought.Īccording to him, the plant had been upgraded several times to increase production of plutonium and in 1985 could make 1.2 kg per week, enough for up to 12 nuclear warheads a year. Vanunu's pictures showed nuclear weapons making equipment in close detail In 1971 he became a sapper in the Israeli army, having failed in his main ambition to join the air force.Īfter military service he was taken on as a trainee at Dimona and ended up working in the underground Machon 2 facility, which he claimed was responsible for the production of the bomb components plutonium, lithium dueteride and beryllium. Mordechai Vanunu is a Moroccan Jew born in 1954, whose family arrived in Israel in 1963. It was against this murky backdrop that the Vanunu affair exploded in 1986. Israel never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, so Dimona is not subject to international scrutiny - and its "ambiguity" policy has been accepted by Washington (which has laws preventing it from supporting proliferating states) at face value. The 1986 Sunday Times story that lifted the lid off Israel's nuclear weapons programmeĮver since admitting that the Dimona plant housed a nuclear reactor rather than a textile factory, Israeli officials have insisted it is intended for exclusively peaceful purposes. Israel is thought to have begun its quest for weapons of mass destruction soon after the establishment of the state in 1948.įaced by a hostile region and vastly outnumbered by its enemies, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion desired a nuclear deterrent, but without wanting to upset Israel's friends by introducing non-conventional weapons into a flashpoint region. It was a decision that led him first to London and the Sunday Times - then to Rome and kidnapping by Israeli intelligence service Mossad - then back to Israel and a long jail sentence. One of the group, Colombian-born freelance journalist Oscar Guerrero, persuaded him to follow his conscience and publish the pictures along with detailed information about the Dimona plant. It is not clear whether Vanunu was already set upon blowing the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear activities, but by the following year he had joined a group of anti-nuclear Christians in Sydney, Australia, coincidentally being baptised as an Anglican. He had worked for nine years as a technician at the Dimona nuclear research centre in the Negev desert - but he left in late 1985 to backpack around the Far East, having become disillusioned with his work.īefore quitting he surreptitiously snapped two rolls of film at the top secret nuclear plant, including equipment for extracting radioactive material for arms production and laboratory models of thermonuclear devices. Vanunu gets a message to the outside world: "Vanunu M, was hijacked in Rome."
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