Christian Pineau was a French politician who served as Foreign Minister. He expressed last-minute qualms about the Israeli reactor, but [[Shimon Peres]] later claimed to have overcome Pineau's doubts by insisting that the reactor, already understood by engineers and officials throughout the French nuclear bureaucracy to be for a bomb, would be utilized only for "research and development." Pineau's signed authorization for the reactor came in late September 1957, precisely when his government was being voted out of office, meaning the formal authorization for [[Dimona]] was signed by an official who was already out of office.[^1] ### Footnotes [^1]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 3.