Agriculture Secretary Ariel Sharon laughed derisively at that argument.
“If I have a choice of being popular and dead or unpopular and alive,” Sharon scoffed, “I choose being alive and unpopular.”
Since the first security cabinet meeting three years earlier, Begin had pledged he would not green-light a mission without the support of the entire cabinet, or at least the ranking political ministers. Hofi and Saguy were considered military, not political. The prime minister had grown impatient in the intervening years while Hussein continued to piece together his would-be atomic juggernaut. That Iraq could not produce an atomic bomb until 1982 or 1985 was beside the point to Begin. The important date was June 1981, when Israeli intelligence estimated Osirak would go hot, and after which Israel could not strike without the risk of causing widespread civilian casualties. Israeli scientists had estimated that destroying al-Tuwaitha and setting off a nuclear reaction could, depending upon the prevailing winds at the time, kill as many as one hundred thousand people as far away as Baghdad.
There was another pressing consideration as well: Israeli national elections were scheduled for the fall. Peres and Labor were enjoying a significant lead in the polls already. If Begin were to lose the prime ministry and a new government was formed, the opportunity to end Iraq’s nuclear threat could be lost forever. The prime minister did not believe Labor had the stomach to deal with the crisis. In any event, by the time a new government was formed, the reactor would be up and running. Begin needed an endgame—and Ivry and Eitan, who had spent the last three years hammering out various plans and then discarding them, had finally delivered.
Dubbed Operation Hatakh Moshem, or “Ammunition Hill,” after the famous ’67 battle led by Doobi’s uncle, the mission was to be carried out by IAF pilots flying F-16s, nonstop and without refueling, at low-level navigation from Israel to al-Tuwaitha. The mission had to be timed perfectly: the attack would commence at sunset on a Sunday to ensure the maximum safety of the French and Italian technicians who would be home on their day off (Israel miscalculated: the end of the workweek and the Iraqi “Sabbath,” or day of rest, was Friday, and though many foreign technicians did take Sundays off, the plant was open for business). In addition, a late attack would give Israeli CSAR teams all night to rescue any downed pilots under cover of darkness. Of course, if the attack were launched too late, the ground would be too dark to distinguish from the horizon—a very dangerous environment for pilots on a bombing run.
Each fighter would carry two bombs. The target would be solely the Osirak reactor. How the F-16s would exceed their deadhead range of 540 to 560 miles to accomplish the 600-mile flight to Baghdad remained to be worked out, as would the type of ordnance used, the exact number of planes, the nature of tactical support, and myriad other details. But Ivry and Eitan assured the cabinet that the mission would be surgical and carry a low risk of casualties—at least, as low as could be expected in such a dangerous operation.
The unlooked-for addition of the F-16s, the thoroughness of the mission planning, and Ivry’s assurances allayed many of the fears of the ministers who harbored doubts about a military operation. In addition, the political ministers, if not completely convinced of the wisdom of a raid, were loath not to support Begin, given the stakes. The prime minister made it clear that Saguy’s earlier pronouncement that he would refuse to take any “responsibility” for a raid, even threatening at one point to withhold intelligence about Osirak from the IAF, would not be brooked.
After the hours of debate and squabbling Begin stood and looked down the table, his dark eyes flickering from the face of one cabinet member to the next. Some of these men he had known for four decades, had fought next to against the British in ’47. He put both hands on the edge of the table and leaned in toward the generals and ministers, his chin up (some wondered later, was it jutting?), and announced, “There will be no other Holocaust in this century! Never. Never again!”
The ministers remained silent. No one dared oppose him—at least to his face. Ivry’s mission was approved. He and Eitan were ordered to put the plan into action. No D day was set, but Begin made it clear he wanted it soon. November was set as a tentative date.
Raz and his squadron pilots at Ramat David continued long-range navigation training. Their numbers grew with the return of the second and third conversion teams from Hill. In the meantime General Ivry and his right-hand man, Col. Aviem Sella, one of the IAF’s leading nuclear bombing and targeting experts, pulled together a secret ten-man operational team of engineers, scientists, computer experts, and combat strategists at IAF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Sella himself had served as an F-4 Phantom pilot at Tel Nof as a member of Israel’s “black” squadron, a nuclear-weapons-capable wing assigned to the nation’s ultimate defense. His experience in targeting and bombing was invaluable. As soon as Ivry had the green light, the operations team gathered in a top secret meeting that included Mossad and army intelligence analysts and their best nuclear scientists to pore over the blueprints of al-Tuwaitha obtained by Arbel’s Paris station. The experts agreed that the key to the entire facility was the reactor itself—without it, the rest of the equipment was harmless. The actual target—ground zero—would be the reactor’s thirty-foot-high dome, which was only several inches thick and composed of reinforced concrete.