- Mordechai Vanunu's revelations in 1986 appeared to confirm
suspicions about Israel's nuclear arsenal and showed a weapons programme
bigger and more advanced than anyone had previously thought.
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- He had worked for nine years as a technician at the Dimona
nuclear research centre in the Negev desert - but he left in late 1985
to backpack around the Far East, having become disillusioned with his work.
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- Before quitting he surreptitiously snapped two rolls
of film at the top secret nuclear plant, including equipment for extracting
radioactive material for arms production and laboratory models of thermonuclear
devices.
-
- It is not clear whether Vanunu was already set upon blowing
the whistle on Israel's secret nuclear activities, but by the following
year he had joined a group of anti-nuclear Christians in Sydney, Australia,
coincidentally being baptised as an Anglican.
-
- One of the group, Colombian-born freelance journalist
Oscar Guerrero, persuaded him to follow his conscience and publish the
pictures along with detailed information about the Dimona plant.
-
- It was a decision that led him first to London and the
Sunday Times - then to Rome and kidnapping by Israeli intelligence service
Mossad - then back to Israel and a long jail sentence.
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- Secret deal
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- Israel is thought to have begun its quest for weapons
of mass destruction soon after the establishment of the state in 1948.
-
- Faced by a hostile region and vastly outnumbered by its
enemies, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion desired a nuclear deterrent, but
without wanting to upset Israel's friends by introducing non-conventional
weapons into a flashpoint region.
-
- So Israel did a secret deal with France to build the
Dimona plant, which is thought to have gone into production to make the
ingredients for nuclear weapons in the 1960s.
-
- Successive governments employed a policy of "nuclear
ambiguity" and have hidden behind the (apparently misleading) formula
that "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into
the Middle East".
-
- Ever since admitting that the Dimona plant housed a nuclear
reactor rather than a textile factory, Israeli officials have insisted
it is intended for exclusively peaceful purposes.
-
- Israel never signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,
so Dimona is not subject to international scrutiny - and its "ambiguity"
policy has been accepted by Washington (which has laws preventing it from
supporting proliferating states) at face value.
-
- It was against this murky backdrop that the Vanunu affair
exploded in 1986.
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- Stunning revelation
-
- Mordechai Vanunu is a Moroccan Jew born in 1954, whose
family arrived in Israel in 1963. In 1971 he became a sapper in the Israeli
army, having failed in his main ambition to join the air force.
-
- After military service he was taken on as a trainee at
Dimona and ended up working in the underground Machon 2 facility, which
he claimed was responsible for the production of the bomb components plutonium,
lithium dueteride and beryllium.
-
- Outside his top secret job, Vanunu began studying philosophy
at Ben Gurion university, where he became more and more involved in politics
- espousing pro-Palestinian views and joining the anti-war movement.
-
- By 1985, he learnt that he was being made redundant,
but he had already decided to leave the plant, taking his infamous photographs
before his departure.
-
- The world was stunned when the Sunday Times published
its expose Revealed: The Secrets of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal on 5 October
1986.
-
- Experts tricked
-
- Editor Andrew Neil described the three-page spread as
the greatest scoop he achieved as head of one of the UK's most influential
papers.
-
- Not only did Vanunu's account expose the sham of the
blind-eye policy towards Israel's nuclear capability by its main ally,
Washington.
-
- His information, which was verified by experts in the
nuclear field, also indicated that Dimona was capable of producing much
more weapons-grade plutonium than previously thought.
-
- According to him, the plant had been upgraded several
times to increase production of plutonium and in 1985 could make 1.2 kg
per week, enough for up to 12 nuclear warheads a year.
-
- Israel's estimated nuclear capability had to be revised
from a handful of weapons to approximately 100-200 warheads, ranging from
battlefield weapons to warheads that could lay waste whole cities.
-
- He also recounted stories of how US experts allowed to
inspect the site in the 1960s had been tricked by false walls and concealed
lifts so they did not even realise the six underground floors at Machon
2 existed.
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- Hate figure
-
- Before the Sunday Times had even printed its story, Mordechai
Vanunu had been lured away from London and kidnapped in Rome in a much-publicised
Mossad sting.
-
- Drugged and bound, he was shipped back home to face the
full force of Israeli justice.
-
- He may have been hailed as a heroic whistle blower by
the anti-nuclear camp outside Israel, which has campaigned doggedly on
his behalf and even had him nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, but there
have been few tears shed for him by Israelis.
-
- Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres - who ordered his
capture, reportedly on Italian soil so as not to embarrass the then-British
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher - expresses the prevailing view.
-
- "[Vanunu] was a traitor to this country. I can't
go into all the processes... The fact is that he was brought to trial,"
Mr Peres said in a recent BBC interview.
-
- Certainly he has done little to endear himself to the
Israeli public - abandoning Judaism, appearing to endanger national security
and jeopardising ties with Washington, Israel's greatest supporter.
-
- And his 18 years incarceration - more than half of the
time in solitary confinement - seems if anything to have sharpened his
political views.
-
- "I claim that I wanted to tell the world about what
was happening... this is not treason, it is informing the world, unlike
Israel's policies," he said in a taped prison interview leaked two
days before the release.
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- Using draconian measures inherited from pre-1948 British
emergency legislation the Israeli judiciary is taking steps to make sure
that Vanunu does not spill any more of Israel's secrets.
-
- He says he has none, but wants to continue his campaign
for Israel to abandon nuclear arms - so he still has the ability to cause
plenty of embarrassment.
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- © BBC MMIV http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3640613.stm
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