Word: dimona
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...efficient technique for producing heavy water. In 1953, Israel, in exchange for these processes, was allowed to study France's nuclear program and participate in its Sahara tests. Four years later, France gave Israel its first nuclear reactor. Later, the French also helped with the design of Israel's Dimona Atomic Research Community in the Negev. which Premier David Ben-Gurion called nothing but a "textile factory...
...Dimona nuclear reactor went into operation in 1964. Meanwhile, an intense secret debate had begun within Israel about whether the government should also build a separation plant to produce the fissionable material necessary for an Abomb. Ben-Gurion and Shimon Peres, then Deputy Defense Minister and currently Israel's Defense Minister, favored doing so. Others, including Mrs. Meir and Yigal Allon, now Israel's Foreign Minister, initially opposed the project. So did Ben-Gurion's successor as Premier, Levi Eshkol. The Israeli equivalent of the U.S. National Security Council vetoed the separation-plant project in early 1968. Shortly afterward, Eshkol...
...Dimona research facility and the separation plant are protected not only by Israeli troops but by highly sophisticated electronic systems and radar screens that operate around the clock. All aircraft?including Israeli military planes?are barred from flying over the areas where the nuclear plants are located. During the Six-Day War, in fact, an Israeli Mirage III?either out of control or with its communications gear in operative?inadvertently flew over Dimona. Israeli defenders shot it down with a ground-to-air missile. In 1973 a Libyan airliner flying from Benghazi to Cairo lost its way because...
...item on Israel's shopping list: the Pershing missile, which has a nuclear potential. Although Jerusalem has never confirmed or denied it, U.S. intelligence experts assume that Israeli technicians have built about ten bulky A-bombs using the uranium that is a byproduct of the country's Dimona reactor. In an interview with TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter, Peres explained Israel's views...
...capability, though, they could easily have it, as could the West Germans, who renounced all nuclear weapons in 1956 as a condition for joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Israel also could quickly become a nuclear power. Since the late 1950s it has had a large atomic reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert; the reactor has been turning out enough fissionable material over the past ten years to build at least one Hiroshima-size bomb annually. Because a bomb can be physically assembled in a matter of weeks if all materials are ready, Israel for all practical purposes could...