WEST BANK (Dispatches) – The Zionist regime began work on the Dimona nuclear reactor in 1958 without informing members of the cabiunet or the regime’s parliament, Israeli historian and Haaretz contributor Adam Raz revealed, citing a trove of primary documents he reportedly received from a secret source at an academic event.
The papers, which include notes, memorandums, drafts and summaries by senior regime officials of the time, including Israel Galili, an adviser to prime ministers Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir, Eshkol himself, cabinet member Yigal Allon and IDF commander Moshe Dayan, military chief-turned prime minister Shimon Peres, and senior diplomat Abba Eban, helped Raz piece together important details about the clandestine project.
The papers revealed that Galili had several concerns about the nuclear program, known as "the enterprise," including its potential to cause then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser to attack the regime to try to take out a "justified target." Finally, he feared that the program could incite Cairo to start work on its own nuclear program.
The documents also indicated that the cost of the Dimona reactor, estimated at about $53 million by Peres in April 1962, was revised upwards by Alon to "three times" the $60 million discussed by the cabinet in 1964. An undated note, presumably written sometime between 1963 and 1966, indicated that the real cost may have been as much as $340 million (about $2.75 billion in present day dollars, accounting for inflation).
"If it were known in advance that it would cost $340 million – would we have voted for Dimona?" the note, written by Eban to Galili, reads.
The documents showed that after Eshkol succeeded David Ben-Gurion as prime minister in 1963, the new PM's foreign minister, Golda Meir, proposed admitting the existence of the program in a bid to get support from America's Jews.
Today, the Zionist regime, which pursues a policy of deliberate ambiguity about its nuclear weapons, is estimated to have 200 to 400 nuclear warheads in its arsenal. The regime has refused to allow inspections of its military nuclear facilities or sign the NPT.
Under Article VI of the NPT, all parties to the treaty undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures related to nuclear disarmament and the cessation of nuclear arms race.
Iran has called on the international community to pressurize the regime into joining and abiding by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), describing it as the only way to bring peace to the Middle East.