Mordecai Vanunu

Mordecai Vanunu was a former technician at a nuclear facility near Dimona, Israel, who became a whistleblower, exposing details of Israel's nuclear program to the London Sunday Times in 1986.¹²

Background and Early Career

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. After his military service, he continued to work there as a civilian. He began sympathizing with the Palestinian cause and was horrified by 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. 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 Israeli nuclear facility. In Nepal, he contacted the Soviet Embassy in Kathmandu and offered them the photographs, but received little in return.¹²

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

Israeli intelligence learned of 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.¹²

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 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 CIA and 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