The two Israeli generals, David Ivry and Raful Eitan, stared in silence at the row of grainy eight-by-tens, dealt like a poker hand on the table before them—aces and eights, a dead man’s hand. Smuggled out of Iraq at great personal risk by Mossad agents, the photographs showed a veritable Nuclear Oz populated by steel-and-glass laboratories, a nuclear fuel reprocessing unit, modern administration buildings, a square mile of electrified fences, and, rising Venuslike in the center of it all, the huge, gleaming aluminum dome of the Osirak nuclear reactor.
Taken from ground level at al-Tuwaitha, the blowups were incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein’s blueprint for an ambitious, modern nuclear program was proceeding at an alarming pace. Israel had known about the center, of course: Mossad had alerted Yitzhak Rabin to the possibility back at the time French prime minister Jacques Chirac first visited Baghdad in 1974 to discuss the trade treaty between France and Iraq. At the time, Israeli prime minister Rabin had called for Jewish-American organizations to pressure the Ford administration to help kill the deal. Defense Minister Shimon Peres had personally appealed to his close friend Chirac to cancel the contract. But the French could not bring themselves to abandon such a fat cash cow. Chirac reassured Peres that perhaps he could do “something” later, after the French national elections. In the end, Rabin decided to “wait and see.”
Now, three years later, in May 1977, it was clear Hussein had much bigger plans than a simple research reactor. Israeli intelligence estimated Osirak would go “hot,” that is, be fueled with radioactive uranium, within three years, four tops. Israeli scientists figured the reactor would produce enough enriched weapons-grade uranium to build two or three Hiroshima-size bombs a year. The contingency people calculated that one “small” atomic bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would kill at least one hundred thousand people.
Begin had just defeated Israel’s liberal Labor Party to become the conservative Likud Party’s first prime minister, and he quickly made dealing with al-Tuwaitha one of his government’s first pieces of business. Thus, this secret Sunday morning meeting at the prime minister’s heavily guarded offices in Jerusalem. Seated before him, along with Eitan and Ivry, was Begin’s new “shadow security cabinet”: Minister of Defense Ezer Weizman, large and bilious, one of Israel’s founding fathers; Deputy Prime Minister Yigael Yadin; Military Intelligence chief Yehoshua Saguy, heavy eyebrows and brush mustache framed by a round face with perennial raccoon circles under his eyes; Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a no-nonsense military general; Agriculture Minister and legendary slash-and-burn tank commander Ariel “Arik” Sharon; and, finally, the chief of Mossad (officially the Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations), Yitzhak Hofi, tough, compact, and stubborn as the craggy Jerusalem pine.
It was obvious to everyone present that diplomacy had failed badly with Hussein. The United States and Britain had expressed official diplomatic “concern” about the sale of a nuclear reactor to Iraq, but the U.S. was not keen on a showdown with the country. Hussein had begun to distance himself from the Soviet union and encourage trade with the West. Iraq was importing more domestic goods from America than from the Soviets. Already, trade had reached some $200 million. Within two years, that figure would triple and, it was estimated, there would be two hundred American businessmen stationed in Baghdad. Having been blackmailed with an oil embargo, Europe was in no hurry to provoke the Arabs again. Certainly, France, which was making billions of francs on its nuclear trade with Iraq, had no intention of stopping work.
Israel would have to deal with Iraq alone. But what were its options? Iraq was one of the richest nations in the Persian Gulf, with a GNP of $18 billion—ten times the size of Israel. It had powerful allies, including the Soviet union and the Arab Rejectionist Front, an organization of Arab nations, including Syria and Yemen, dedicated to the destruction of Israel. Iraq’s army boasted 190,000 men, 12 divisions, 2,200 tanks, and 450 attack planes.
Surprisingly, the two intelligence chiefs, the IDF’s General Saguy and Mossad’s Hofi, as well as Begin’s own Deputy Prime Minister Yadin, vehemently opposed any type of military raid. Such violation of a nation’s sovereignty was tantamount to an act of war, they argued. It was too risky and there were too many unknowns. And besides, who knew for sure whether Iraq was truly capable of building an atomic bomb? It required a sophisticated technological and educated infrastructure, which Iraq clearly did not possess. Eitan and Ivry, joined by Sharon, countered that Israel could not afford to wait and find out.