Raid on the Sun(33)

Operations quickly discarded the idea of using so-called “smart bombs.” These were mostly U.S.-made GBU-15s, which were dropped at a distance from the target and then guided by the pilot through remote-control movable fins and a television camera in the bomb nose. But the bombs were large and cumbersome, and the added weight and drag would reduce fuel efficiency, already a crucial factor in the long-range mission. Moreover, the new smart bombs were not 100 percent reliable and, worse, would demand the pilots’ attention and add to their workload at the precise time they were most vulnerable to AAA fire. The success of the mission, Ivry was convinced, rested on simplicity and the element of surprise.

The team determined that the most efficient means of penetrating the dome and destroying the reactor beneath was to drop two-thousand-pound MK-84 slick, or “dumb,” bombs, which simply used gravity. The bombs created a horizontal destruction pattern extending thirty-four hundred feet—more than enough to take out the entire reactor. They could be rigged for either instant detonation or delayed fusing and were simple, foolproof, and effective—something the pilots, taxed already with sophisticated mechanical and navigational systems, would welcome.

IAF wanted to be absolutely certain the bombs would do the job. No one had ever bombed a nuclear reactor before, and no one in Israel really knew for certain just what would happen if one were detonated. To find out, the IDF discreetly contacted two Israeli nuclear engineers at Haifa’s prestigious Technion University, Joseph Kivity and Joseph Saltovitz, and recruited them for a mission. The scientists would travel to Washington and meet with representatives of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which licensed and regulated nuclear energy facilities in the U.S. The scientists could not, of course, tell the NRC officials the truth about what Israel really wanted to know: what was the most efficient means of destroying Iraq’s unfinished nuclear reactor at al-Tuwaitha. Instead, Israeli intelligence created a cover story for the engineers. They would pose as representatives of the Israeli Electric Company, which supposedly was considering purchasing an electric-power reactor from the United States. The Israeli scientists would tell NRC the electric company was concerned about terrorism and threats from Arab neighbors and wanted to know what the effect would be if the facility were bombed.

The fact that Israel was deceiving its closest ally, indeed, its lifeline in the Middle East, did not seem to overly concern the planners. It was a defining distinction between Israel’s political and military institutions and those of Western nations. The IDF, though highly trained and highly professional, nonetheless retained some of the seat-of-the-pants instincts, the risk-taking, that had marked the outlawed citizen army of the Haganah that had fought for the independence of the Jewish state. Such a serious mission, if considered by the United States military, would have occasioned months of bureaucratic second-guessing. Decisions in the Pentagon, as Vietnam had so vividly shown, tended many times to be driven more by fear of failure than will to succeed. Again, in the wake of the Iraq War, political considerations about how U.S. intentions might be perceived by Iraqis and the world community drove the military’s occupying strategy rather than adherence to strict military tactics or even pragmatic solutions. The IDF, by comparison, seemed almost reckless.

Bypassing the usual diplomatic State Department or Defense channels, the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., contacted the NRC directly to ask for a meeting with the electric company scientists. A meeting was set up for October 9, 1980. The two engineers, Kivity and Saltovitz, flew to Washington on the eighth and met the following day with John O’Brien, James Costello, and Shou Hou in the NRC’s local research offices. Kivity and Saltovitz wanted to know, specifically, what would happen to their reactor if, say, “a 1,000-kilogram [2,200-pound] charge penetrated [the] concrete barriers and detonated after penetration.”

The officials, drawing from numerous studies conducted by the NRC, the U.S. military, and the Defense Department, detailed for Kivity and Saltovitz what systems in the reactor were most vulnerable to such an explosion and whose failure would result in “significant consequences,” as Costello put it, and thus were “optimal targets for sabotage.” In general, these were the reactor’s fuel rods and the cooling systems. When Kivity and Saltovitz finished debriefing Costello, O’Brien, and Hou of all the knowledge and data they needed, the Israelis thanked their fellow scientists, shook hands, and then caught the first El Al flight back to Tel Aviv. There, they informed Ivry and his staff that the two-thousand-pound dumb bombs would be more than sufficient to destroy Osirak—if it were bombed before going hot. If the reactor were bombed while fueled with fissionable uranium, the NRC had confirmed, there would be danger of an uncontrolled reaction precipitating a nuclear event.