Word: iraqi
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Israeli time, the lead fighter penetrated Iraqi airspace. The aircraft continued to change course continuously as they moved in on target, howling through the Sunday twilight at 400 m.p.h. For months the Israelis had studied the route up the Euphrates Valley, convinced that they could negotiate it without being detected by radar or ground observers. Fifty minutes after takeoff, the warplanes sighted their target, the distinctive cupola housing the nuclear reactor. The aircraft wheeled and climbed toward the setting sun?the classic maneuver prior to attack...
Outside Israel?and even inside the country?there was an immediate suspicion that the raid and its timing had more to do with Israel's June 30 national election than with impending nuclear threats from the Iraqis. The six-month campaign between Begin's ruling Likud coalition and the opposition Labor Party of Shimon Peres was one of the most strained in the country's history. Owing in part to Begin's tough stance on the Syrian missiles in Lebanon, his party had moved ahead, 38% to 33%, in a poll conducted before the raid. The Likud had trailed...
Begin built his rationale for the attack on Iraqi documents. Following the September raid by Iran on the Tammuz reactor, Iraq issued a statement that Begin read from a Baghdad newspaper. Quoted Begin: "The Iranian people should not fear the Iraqi nuclear reactor, which is not intended to be used against Iran, but against the Zionist enemy." He added that the imminent start-up of the reactor would enable Iraq to begin manufacturing, "in the near future, between three and five Hiroshima-type nuclear bombs of 20 kilotons...
...deciding round of French presidential elections. As a "supreme civic duty," he warned Begin not to go ahead. Peres felt, correctly, as it happened, that Socialist François Mitterrand would win, and that there were signs that the new French President would do everything possible to "make the Iraqi reactor impotent, militarily." Peres also warned Begin that the raid would leave Israel as isolated "as a lonely shrub in the desert...
From the outset, Iraq has claimed that the nearly completed, $260 million French-built research reactor, scheduled to be activated this summer was intended only to train Iraqi scientists and technicians in nuclear technology. A facility was first discussed in 1974 by then French Premier Jacques Chirac and Iraq's Saddam Hussein. The final agreement led to the erection of the 70-MW reactor at the Tammuz nuclear center in the desert at El-Tuwaitha. It was supported by an 800-kW minireactor, separately housed and untouched by the raid, that was used for minor experiments and to prepare...