[[Mordecai Vanunu]] was a former technician at a nuclear facility near [[Dimona]], [[Israel]], who became a whistleblower, exposing details of [[Israel|Israel's]] nuclear program to the _London Sunday Times_ in 1986.[^1][^2] ### Background and Early Career [[Mordecai Vanunu|Vanunu]] was born in [[Morocco]] to a right-wing Jewish family that migrated to [[Israel]] in the early 1960s. He grew up in [[Beersheba]] and was drafted into the military, where he was trained as a technician at the [[Dimona reactor]]. After his military service, he continued to work there as a civilian. He began sympathizing with the Palestinian cause and was horrified by [[Israel|Israel's]] nuclear capabilities.[^1] ### Work at Dimona and Security Breach Vanunu began working as a technician at [[Dimona]] in August 1977 and spent much of the next eight years assigned to various tasks inside the reprocessing plant, formally known as Machon 2 and informally as the Tunnel. This plant, handling highly radioactive materials, was the most sensitive area at [[Dimona]], with only 150 of Dimona's 2,700 employees working there. A special pass was required for entry, and all movement was theoretically closely monitored. However, Vanunu found that the stringent security existed only in theory.[^2] Constantly in trouble for his public pro-Arab views, Vanunu was laid off in mid-1985 as part of a government-wide cutback. He appealed through his union and won back his job. It was at this point that he smuggled a camera into the reprocessing plant during an overnight shift and wandered around undetected for some forty minutes, taking fifty-seven color photographs. A few weeks later, he was fired after calling for the formation of a Palestinian state during an Arab rally. Even then, with union help, Vanunu negotiated a settlement from Dimona's management, receiving severance pay and a letter attesting to his good record.[^2] ### Exile and Attempts to Share Information A combination of factors—disenchantment with his life, distress at the treatment of Arabs in [[Israel]], and what he had learned inside [[Dimona]]—drove him to exile in [[Australia]] and eventually to the _London Sunday Times_. [[Mordecai Vanunu|Vanunu]] first traveled to [[Thailand]] and [[Nepal]], where he converted to [[Buddhism]]. He carried with him photographs and undeveloped film of the inside of the [[Israel|Israeli]] nuclear facility. In [[Nepal]], he contacted the [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] Embassy in [[Kathmandu]] and offered them the photographs, but received little in return.[^1][^2] [[Mordecai Vanunu|Vanunu]] later traveled to [[Australia]], where he preached about the evils of nuclear power and shared his top-secret photos with a church prayer group. He converted to [[Christianity]] and worked as a part-time taxi driver. [[Oscar Guerrero]], a freelance journalist, saw the photographs and proposed publishing them for a fee.[^1] ### Mossad Operation and Capture [[Israel|Israeli]] intelligence learned of [[Mordecai Vanunu|Vanunu's]] activities and sought to stop him. Copies of some of Vanunu's sensational photographs were made available in [[London]]—before publication of the _Sunday Times_ story—to an Israeli intelligence agent masquerading as an American newspaper reporter. The photographs were sent by courier to the office of Prime Minister [[Shimon Peres]], who ordered [[Mossad]] to get Vanunu out of [[London]] and into Israeli custody. [[Cindy Hanin Bentov]], a [[Mossad]] agent, enticed Vanunu to leave for [[Rome]] a few days before publication. Once in [[Rome]], Vanunu was drugged and returned to [[Israel]] by ship to stand trial. He was sentenced in March 1988 to eighteen years in a maximum-security prison for espionage and treason.[^1][^2] ### Impact on American Intelligence Vanunu's _Times_ interview and his photographs of many of the production units in the Tunnel, or Machon 2, provided the American intelligence community with the first extensive evidence of Israeli capability to manufacture fusion, or thermonuclear, weapons. American intelligence also obtained copies of many of the _Sunday Times_'s interview notes with Vanunu, which provided more specific detail of the inner workings of [[Dimona]]. Senior American officials and nuclear experts uniformly agreed that the unpublished Vanunu notes are highly credible, with one official describing the scope of the operation as "much more extensive than we thought."[^2] The most exhaustive analysis of the Vanunu statements and photographs was conducted by the Z Division, a special intelligence unit at the [[Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory|Livermore Laboratories]]. While Z Division's only debate was over the numbers, as Vanunu claimed [[Israel]]'s nuclear stockpile totaled over two hundred warheads (a number significantly higher than [[Central Intelligence Agency|CIA]] and [[Defense Intelligence Agency|DIA]] estimates), American nonproliferation experts independently learned of a boost in [[Dimona]]'s cooling capacity, further evidence of Vanunu's credibility.[^2] ### Nuclear Program Timeline and Capabilities Vanunu's revelations helped American intelligence experts date the progress of the Israeli nuclear arsenal. He revealed that Unit 92 in the Tunnel had been painstakingly removing tritium from heavy water since the 1960s, indicating that physicists at [[Dimona]] had been attempting to manufacture "boosted" fission weapons from the earliest days of production. In 1980, he was assigned to work at a new production plant for lithium 6, another essential element of the hydrogen bomb. In 1984, a new facility (Unit 93) for large-scale production of tritium was opened, suggesting that full-scale production of neutron weapons began then.[^2] ### Dimona Facility Structure As described by Vanunu, [[Dimona]] includes the reactor (Machon 1) and at least eight other buildings, or Machons, with Machon 2 (the chemical reprocessing plant) being the most essential. Machon 1 is the large silver-domed reactor, sixty feet in diameter, where uranium fuel rods remain for three months and are cooled by heavy water. The steam created is vented into the atmosphere, creating a radioactive cloud. Machon 3 converts lithium 6 into a solid for insertion into a nuclear warhead and processes natural uranium for the reactor. Machon 4 contains a waste treatment plant for radioactive residue from Machon 2. Machon 5 coats uranium rods with aluminum for consumption in the reactor. Machon 6 provides basic services and power. Machon 8 contains a laboratory for testing samples and experimenting on new manufacturing processes, and is also the site of Special Unit 840, where Israeli scientists developed a gas centrifuge method of enriching uranium. Machon 9 houses a laser-isotope-reprocessing facility for uranium enrichment. Depleted uranium is chemically isolated in Machon 10 for shipment to the Israeli Defense Force or sale to arms manufacturers.[^2] ### Production Capacity The Tunnel (Machon 2) remained in operation around the clock for thirty-four weeks a year, producing a weekly average of 1.2 kilograms of pure plutonium, enough for four to a dozen or more bombs annually, depending on warhead design. This production rate suggests the reactor operates at about 120 to 150 megawatts, more than five times its officially stated output, consuming nearly one hundred tons of uranium ore a year. The precision involved in machining plutonium hemispheres and placing them around gases for boosted nuclear weapons was achieved through advancements in robotics, a field in which [[Aharon Katzir]] was world-renowned for his research at the [[Weizmann Institute of Science]].[^2] ### Footnotes [^1]: Ben-Menashe, Ari. _Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network_. TrineDay, 1992. (Hereafter, "Profits of War") [^2]: Hersh, Seymour M. _The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy_. Random House, 1991. Chapter 15.