nuclear-news

Newly found documents reveal Israel’s nuclear weapons drive

A spring 1964 Canadian intelligence report revealed Argentina had secretly agreed to supply Israel with at least 80 tons of uranium oxide “yellowcake” to fabricate fuel for a mysterious nuclear reactor Israel was constructing with French assistance near the town of Dimona in the Negev Desert.

Spent, or irradiated, reactor fuel can be reprocessed to harvest plutonium for making nuclear weapons and, since 1960, the U.S. and its allies conjectured Israel was pursuing a nuclear weapons program.

But the eye-opening Canadian report, which the U.S. initially doubted, confirmed fears that Israel was ambitiously seeking a secret uranium supply, under which there would be no international safeguards to ensure the yellowcake was used for peaceful purposes.

Forty-three previously secret U.S. and British government archival documents related to the Israeli yellowcake file recently surfaced and have now been published by the U.S. National Security Archives in concert with two nuclear non-proliferation organizations……

“These nearly unknown documents shed light on one of the most obscure aspects of Israel’s nuclear history — how secretly and vigorously Israel sought raw materials for its nuclear program and how persistently it tried to cultivate relations with certain nuclear suppliers,” William Burr, of the National Security Archive, and Avner Cohen, of the James Martin Centre for Non-proliferation Studies, write in an online introduction to the archival find. (The pair also authored a July 1 expose in Foreign Affairs magazine.)

“The story of the Argentine yellowcake sale to Israel has remained largely unknown in part because Israel has gone to great lengths to keep tight secrecy to this day about how and where it acquired raw materials for its nuclear program.”……

British Foreign Office official Alan Goodison, after receiving the Canadian information, calculated that the Israelis could produce a nuclear bomb by the summer of 1965. “Their anxiety to obtain such a large quantity of safeguard-free uranium suggests … sinister motives,” he wrote in a memo.

Publicly, however, the U.S., Canada and Britain remained silent. “The United States has always been ambivalent about Israel’s nuclear program, and exposing what it knew or suspected about the Israeli nuclear program could have caused the United States serious diplomatic problems with Israel’s Arab neighbours and possibly the Soviet Union,” Burr and Cohen write in Foreign Policy.

The source who gave Canadian intelligence details of the yellowcake deal has never been revealed, nor has the identity of the department or agency involved…… http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Canadian+report+Israeli+nuclear+program+stunned+1964+diplomatic/8648626/story.html

July 13, 2013 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war