Word: french
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...then detonated with a sophisticated fuse. The metal cores, built over a period of three years, had already been crated for delivery to their buyer, Iraq, and were due to be shipped only three days later. The reactor components were 60% destroyed; the damage was estimated at $23 million. French officials estimated that delivery would be delayed for two years, which would also postpone the shipment of 65 kilograms of enriched uranium fuel that France had agreed to supply along with the reactor. That is enough uranium to build at least half a dozen "dirty" atomic bombs of Hiroshima force...
...explosive as the blast itself was a bomb of a question: Who had pulled off the nuclear sabotage? An environmental organization calling itself Groupe des Écologistes Français claimed responsibility. No one had ever heard of the group before the explosion, and French authorities dismissed its claims. But by imposing a blackout on news of the police investigation, government officials inspired speculation in the press about possible, and some rather impossible, culprits. France Soir reported that the police believed "extreme leftists" had planted the explosives. Le Matin de Paris suggested that the act had been committed by Palestinians...
More serious theorists had a more obvious culprit-Israel. Fearful that Iraq would use the reactor to produce bombs rather than electricity, the Israelis have been protesting the proposed shipment for the past three years. The French had been stung many times before by MOSSAD, Israel's secret service, notably on Christmas morning 1969, when its agents piloted five embargoed gunboats from the port city of Cherbourg to Haifa in a daring and well-executed maneuver. Certainly, Israel benefits from the sabotage, but its officials have denied that they triggered the La Seyne explosion, branding such suggestions "anti-Semitism...
Whoever was responsible, the incident may be a blessing in disguise for French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. The contract with Iraq was engineered in 1975 by then Premier Jacques Chirac, with Giscard's approval. The deal was kept secret until the following year. Then it was announced as a commercial agreement between several French companies and Iraq, rather than an accord between two nations, thus allowing the arrangement to escape an acrimonious debate in the French parliament. After Chirac's resignation in 1976, Giscard "began having second thoughts about the contract. He feared France...
Italian and French police are said to have been tracking Negri for several months, after one of the kidnapers' calls was broadcast in the hope someone would recognize the voice. A Milan judge named Emilio Alessandrini identified it as that of the young professor, with whom he had dined on April 11, 1978, while Moro was still captive. Last January, Alessandrini was killed by terrorists belonging to a Red Brigades splinter group...