Raid on the Sun(31)
In the center of it all rose the mammoth thirty-foot-high dome of Osirak, officially renamed Tammuz I by Hussein. In his long-range plans, Osirak would be the first of numerous nuclear reactors built around the country. The Osirak reactor beneath the dome was essentially an open pool, thirty feet deep and filled with light water, which covered the plumbing, coolants, and the control and fuel rods. The light water would help modulate the rate of fission along with the control rods, slowing down the flow of free neutrons between the uranium pellets. The arching cupola functioned as an airtight vacuum to prevent radiation leakage. Scientists conducting experiments worked directly in the pool, manipulating the machinery by hand. Beneath the pool, ten feet underground, was the drive mechanism for the control rods and, extending west, the neutron guide hall, a large concrete room 60 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 30 feet high. Equipped with a twenty-ton bridge crane that traveled up and down the length of the room on steel beams, the hall was used to conduct separate experiments with free neutrons, which were siphoned from the fissioning uranium in the reactor.
A ground-level control room flanked the reactor pool and the dome. Within the building, adjacent to the reactor, was the Italian-made hot cell used to separate plutonium from uranium, which the Iraqis had renamed Project 30 July in honor of the Ba’thist revolution. Next door to Osirak stood the smaller French reactor, Isis.
A large guardhouse stood near the main gate, framed by a metal detector and X-ray machine. Soldiers in combat fatigues carrying AK-47s roamed the open spaces, which were ringed with closed-circuit television cameras. As Mossad had seen, the entire facility was fortified by a hundred-foot-high earthen revetment. Positioned at all four corners were AAA, antiaircraft armament, including batteries of Soviet-made ZSU 23mm guns on modified tanks, which fired four hundred rounds a minute. In between the AAA emplacements were Soviet-made SAM-6 surface-to-air missiles and radar-tracking units.
The photographs of the installation and reports out of Iraq had sparked a new urgency in Begin and the pro-raid ministers. For one thing, Iraq, exuding a new sense of invincibility, was no longer being as careful about hiding the ultimate use of its new nuclear program. In October 1980 the Iraqi daily Al Thawara ran an article about the Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha, reporting that Iraq intended the facility to be used “against the Zionist enemies.” Meanwhile, Israeli intelligence estimates predicted that Iraq would have enough plutonium to produce two atomic bombs by 1982.
Pressed by Saguy and Hofi, Begin agreed to one final attempt at diplomacy. Israel’s foreign minister Yitzhak Shamir called on the French embassy in Tel Aviv to warn the chargé d’affaires that Baghdad’s French-built nuclear reactor could ignite a conflict in the region and set back recent gains in attaining peace in the Middle East. In a final plea, Begin sent a personal diplomatic letter to French president Giscard d’Estaing virtually begging him to pull out the French technicians from al-Tuwaitha and hold back from sending Iraq the remaining twelve kilos of enriched uranium. Giscard d’Estaing replied that he could not comply, but once again reassured Begin that France would never allow Iraq to develop weapons using the Osirak reactor.
A week later Mossad reported to Begin that Osirak would go hot within six months.
Begin made up his mind. About October 15 (the actual date remains classified), the prime minister called together a second secret meeting of the ranking cabinet ministers at his offices in Jerusalem. Yadin, Hofi, and Saguy continued to have serious objections to a raid. Yadin, in fact, had threatened to resign if Begin went through with the mission. Hofi and Yadin doubted that an attack could destroy the twelve kilos of enriched uranium France had already sent to al-Tuwaitha. Mossad had determined that the uranium was stored inside a concrete pyramid in an underground chamber located next to the neutron guide hall. Israel would be risking worldwide condemnation for nothing. Saguy believed that Israel still had no firm evidence that Iraq was yet capable of building an atomic bomb, and he was not persuaded that any perceived threat to Israel’s security was justification for an unprovoked military attack on a sovereign nation.
“I do not believe fears of a ‘Second Holocaust’ justify the Israeli military taking any steps it thinks fit,” Saguy told the assembled ministers.
Defense Minister Weizman had been so vehemently against a military raid that he had resigned in May in order to run against Begin within his own conservative Likud Party. Outside the administration, the Labor Party candidate for prime minister, Shimon Peres, and Labor Party chieftain Mordechai Gur had been leaked word of a proposed military strike against Osirak and were adamantly opposing any such operation, fearing it would endanger Israel’s relations with the United States and the Europeans, isolating the tiny state.