The_Info_Web/60 - PLACES/MILITARY_INSTALLATIONS/Dimona.md

aliases	created	updated	title	tags	category	summary	start	location
Dimona Negev Nuclear Research Center Nuclear Research Center Negev Dimona reactor Dimona facility	2025-01-09	2026-10-08	Dimona	Place Israel Nuclear NegevDesert Intelligence SamsonOption Vanunu VelaIncident ArmsControl	Military Installation	Israel's Negev Nuclear Research Center near Beersheba, built from 1958 with French help and discovered by the United States in 1960, visited but never inspected by American teams until July 1969.	1958	Negev Desert, Israel

Dimona is the site in the Negev Desert of Israel, south-east of Beersheba, of the Negev Nuclear Research Center: a heavy water reactor, a chemical reprocessing plant and associated buildings that France helped build from 1958. The Israeli government's own description of its purpose was for years a series of cover stories; the American record of the reactor consists of intelligence discovery in 1960, ten years of negotiated "visits" ending in July 1969, and a 1986 account by the technician Mordecai Vanunu.

Origins and French construction

Avner Cohen and William Burr wrote that in 1955, after David Ben-Gurion returned as prime minister and defense minister, he delegated a feasibility effort to Shimon Peres, then director general of the Defense Ministry; that Israeli Atomic Energy Commission chairman Ernst David Bergmann favored self-reliance while Peres sought a foreign supplier; and that by 1958 the plan had France as supplier, Norway (with the British) supplying heavy water, and the United States supplying a small "Atoms for Peace" package that could serve as camouflage.¹ A secret Israel-Norway agreement of June 1959 provided for the sale of heavy water through the United Kingdom; it was reported by the political officer at the American embassy in Oslo, Richard Kerry, the father of John Kerry.¹ Seymour Hersh wrote that Guy Mollet, "obsessed with the consequences of France's failure" at Suez, "was quoted as telling an aide" at the time of the talks with Peres and Golda Meir: "I owe the bomb to them. I owe the bomb to them"; that the formal French-Israeli agreement has never been made public; and that the firm Saint-Gobain, which had worked at Marcoule, was chosen to build the reprocessing facility underground, its engineers being "stunned" that the reactor's cooling ducts and waste facilities suggested operation at two to three times the 24 megawatts of thermal power the agreement specified.² Hersh wrote that the French-Israeli work made the Negev site a "French boom town," with upward of 2,500 French men, women and children living there, and that the reactor "went critical sometime in 1962" and "was capable of being operated at more than seventy megawatts."³ The French foreign minister, Maurice Couve de Murville, told Secretary of State Christian Herter on December 16, 1960 that France had helped Israel build a "replica of [the] Marcoule plant" and that under the bilateral agreement France would supply raw materials and receive any plutonium produced.¹

Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion's decision to finance Dimona outside the Israeli budget led Peres, "sometime in 1960," to form, according to Israeli sources, a group of donors called the Committee of Thirty, among them Baron Edmund de Rothschild of Paris and Abraham Feinberg of New York, president of the Israel Bond Organization; Hersh quoted Peres as saying that "not one penny [for Dimona] came from the government budget," and wrote that the project later cost "upward of $500 million a year" in the 1960s, more than 10 percent of the Israeli military budget, according to a former aide to Levi Eshkol.⁴ Cohen and Burr recorded that the financing of Dimona, "through both the diversion of U.S. government aid and the use of tax-deductible individual charities," played an important role in the internal deliberations of the Eisenhower administration when it learned of the site.¹

Discovery, 1960

Cohen and Burr, publishing declassified documents in 2015, wrote that the first known reference to Dimona in American records was in late July 1960, when a "U.S. corporate official" learned of it from an Israeli oil executive and told diplomats in Tel Aviv that the site would be a power reactor; that Henry Gomberg, a University of Michigan nuclear engineering professor, learned on a November 1960 trip that Israel had a secret reactor project involving plutonium experiments; and that in September 1960, on a helicopter flight near the site with Ambassador Ogden Reid, the senior Treasury Ministry official Addy Cohen answered a question about the construction by saying "that's a textile plant," later telling an embassy officer that "that was our story at the time" and that "we have been misbehaving."¹ The British diplomat Ian Smart, third secretary in Tel Aviv, told Hersh that "there was a lot of talk by the end of 1960 about Dimona," that Israeli officials told the British embassy in turn that the site was a desert grasslands research institute and, at a military checkpoint, a "manganese-processing plant," and that during his last year he reported the "suspicion" that it looked like a nuclear reactor.⁵ Dino Brugioni, a Central Intelligence Agency photo interpreter, told Hersh that officers watched the fencing, new road and subterranean digging on U-2 Spy Plane imagery.⁶

Special National Intelligence Estimate 100-8-60 of December 8, 1960 stated that "Israel is engaged in construction of a nuclear reactor complex in the Negev near Beersheba" and that "plutonium production for weapons is at least one major purpose of this effort," and estimated that Israel would produce some weapons-grade plutonium in 1963 to 1964, possibly as early as 1962; a large part of the estimate remains classified. At a meeting of December 19, 1960 President Dwight D. Eisenhower discussed Israeli fundraising in the United States and plans to encourage visits and International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards.¹ Hersh wrote that Arthur Krock sent the New York Times reporter John W. Finney to the Atomic Energy Commission chairman John McCone, who told him "They lied to us. The Israelis. They told us it was a textile plant," and that Finney's article appeared on the front page of December 19, 1960.⁷ Cohen and Burr called the late discovery "a major blunder," "an intelligence failure," and, from the Israeli side, "a tremendous counterintelligence success."¹ The vault's pages on John L. Hadden, Robert T. Webber and Carmelo Alba describe the American embassy's later efforts: Hersh wrote that Alba, then the U.S. Army's military attache, photographed the site monthly with a telescopic camera until a picture showed "smoke coming out of the dome," and that Hadden, the CIA station chief from 1963, sent Alba to Beersheba to count French names on mailboxes.⁸

American visits, 1961 to 1969

Hersh wrote that Ben-Gurion insisted that inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency would violate Israeli sovereignty, and that John F. Kennedy's White House agreed to an American team on terms by which it "would have to schedule its visits well in advance, and with the full acquiescence of Israel. There would be no spot checks permitted."⁹ He wrote that Floyd L. Culler, Jr. dated the first inspection to 1962 and that Culler's teams made the visits.¹⁰ According to Hersh, the Israeli scheme "based on plans supplied by the French" built a false control room at Dimona "complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor"; Culler told him he reported to the White House that the reactor was a "standard reactor," and when informed of the false room replied, "It's possible to make a system appear that it's controlling something when it's not." A former member of the Israeli General Staff Reconnaissance Unit told Hersh that weeks before an inspection soldiers brought "eight semitrailers loaded with grass. It was sod, all for camouflage," to cover walks and bunkers.¹¹ The CIA photo interpreter Brugioni told Hersh that the sudden grass "just spotlights activity."¹¹

The documents of 1969 give the American side. On March 17, 1969 Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird wrote to the Secretary of State, the national security adviser and the Director of Central Intelligence, under the subject "Stopping the Introduction of Nuclear Weapons Into the Middle East," that he had seen "additional evidence of activity" (the object is redacted), referred to export licenses granted the previous June and October for two Control Data 6400 computers and one IBM 360/65 computer, and endorsed David Packard's recommendation that shipment of the second CDC 6400 be withheld.¹² The visit of July 10 to 13, 1969 was, in a State Department memorandum of June 12, 1970, "the last 'visit' to Dimona"; the memorandum added that "no one in the U.S. community has been satisfied with the restrictions and conditions Israel has imposed."¹³ In a memorandum of conversation of August 13, 1969 between Dr. Charles H. Reichardt, the AEC's Director of Intelligence, his deputy Charles A. Sommer, George B. Pleat, chief of the Dimona inspection team, and a State Department officer, the team was said to have drawn "the inference that the US government is not prepared to support a real 'inspection' effort," to have been "cautioned to avoid controversy" and to "be gentlemen," and to have been "criticized roundly" by the Israelis on one occasion "for having 'acted like inspectors'"; the State officer added that "visits conducted under these approaches may even be counter-productive."¹⁴ A State Department background paper of September 19, 1969 for the visit of Golda Meir, drafted by Robert H. Munn and cleared by Joseph Sisco, Rodger Davies, the Atomic Energy Commission and a CIA officer named Chamberlain, stated: "Our 'visits' to Dimona have shed virtually no light on the role that site may play in a weapons program," that "we have actually learned very little from the standpoint of a weapons program," that Israel had since about 1963 "moved as rapidly as possible" on strategic missiles and warheads, that "all the facilities required for production of plutonium have been identified with the exception of a separation plant," that "others feel confident that Israel already has one or more complete nuclear weapons now," and that Israel's formula was "Israel will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Near East."¹⁵ Henry Kissinger's memorandum of October 7, 1969, "Discussions with the Israelis on Nuclear Matters," was written after the meeting of Richard Nixon and Meir.¹⁶ Hersh wrote that the Israeli leadership "correctly interpreted the end of the Culler inspections as an American carte blanche."¹⁷

June 1967

A Control Group paper dated by the Foreign Relations of the United States editors to June 17, 1967 carries an annex on indigenous capabilities to develop nuclear weapons. It describes the reactor at Dimona as a French-built facility of 25 MW, not under International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards but inspected by the United States, which "is capable of producing enough plutonium for approximately one nuclear weapon per year." It states that the spent fuel rods "are still at Dimona and have not been subjected to chemical separation," that before the crisis the Israelis "had probably not made a decision to develop nuclear weapons, but probably had decided to keep that option open," and that a decision made then would probably mean 18 months or longer before a first weapon.¹⁸

On June 27, 1967, the American ambassador Walworth Barbour reported from Tel Aviv that Israelis "who have technical capability to build bomb, would, it may be argued, be foolish not to produce extra-conventional weapons." He wrote that the rising popularity of Moshe Dayan, "who has been associated with those favoring the nuclear weapons development," and any rise in the standing of Dayan's associates Peres and Ben-Gurion, "who made the decisions to build Dimona," could lead Israel closer to the nuclear route.¹⁹ Hersh writes that after the war the intelligence about Dimona became highly compartmentalized as the White House decided to side more openly with Israel, and quotes an unnamed American official: "We knew about the yellowcake, but we weren't allowed to keep a file on it."²⁰ Relying on Bill Dale, the embassy's deputy chief of mission, Hersh writes that Barbour told the military attaches at the end of the war that they were no longer to report on Dimona, and quotes Barbour: "Israel is going to be our main ally."²¹

Avner Cohen, on the basis of interviews with the late Yitzhak Ya'akov, describes the assembly in May 1967 of two or three rudimentary nuclear explosives and a plan, Operation Shimshon, to detonate them in the Egyptian desert as a last resort; the Wilson Center, which released Cohen's collection in June 2017, described Ya'akov's testimony as revealing "for the first time the existence of a crash effort to assemble Israel's first nuclear device."²²²³ Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez argue that Soviet MiG-25 Foxbat aircraft overflew Dimona in May 1967, to encourage Israel to launch a war and to ensure the site could be destroyed in a planned Arab-Soviet counterattack, and report that in August 2007 the Russian Air Force spokesman Colonel Aleksandr V. Drobyshevsky confirmed in writing that Soviet pilots had flown the sorties.²⁴

Facilities, as described by Vanunu

Mordecai Vanunu, a technician, gave photographs and an account to the London Sunday Times in 1986 that Hersh summarized as follows. The complex has a main reactor and at least eight other buildings (machons). Machon 1 houses the silver-domed reactor, 60 feet in diameter and visible from a nearby highway, with uranium rods left in the core about three months, heavy water cooled by ordinary water through a heat exchanger, and steam vented into the atmosphere. Machon 2, "the Tunnel," is the six-level underground reprocessing plant where plutonium is extracted; its control room contains an observation area called "Golda's Balcony" for Meir's visits after 1969; plutonium is molded into hemispheres in glove boxes on level five, with lithium compounds and beryllium; and Vanunu gave the output as a weekly average of nine "buttons" of plutonium weighing 1.2 kilograms. Machon 3 converts lithium 6 and processes natural uranium; Machon 4 treats waste; Machon 5 coats rods with aluminum; Machon 6 supplies services and power; Machon 8 holds a test laboratory and Special Unit 840, "where Israeli scientists have developed a gas centrifuge method of enriching uranium for weapons use"; Machon 9 holds a laser-isotope facility; Machon 10 isolates depleted uranium. Unit 92 had been removing tritium from heavy water since the 1960s and Unit 93, opened in 1984, produced tritium on a large scale. The reactor ran 34 weeks a year.²⁵ Vanunu's account is the sole source for these passages; Hersh's note states that the nuclear physicist Frank Barnaby spent two days with Vanunu for the Sunday Times and concluded that the account "is totally convincing." The vault's pages on Machon 1, Machon 2, Machon 3, Machon 4, Machon 5, Machon 6, Machon 8, Machon 9 and Machon 10 carry the individual descriptions.

The security apparatus

Hersh wrote that Binyamin Blumberg, a former military intelligence officer chosen by Peres, headed the Office of Special Tasks, later known as LAKAM, placed in the Defense Ministry to protect the nuclear project, collect technical information abroad and set up front companies for restricted equipment.²⁶ He wrote that Israeli forces watched for photography, that aircraft, "including those belonging to the Israeli Air Force," are forbidden to overfly the site, and that in 1967 an Israeli Mirage was shot down in its airspace.²⁷

Output and tests, as reported by Hersh

Hersh wrote that "sometime early in 1968, Dimona finally was ordered into full-scale production and began turning out four or five warheads a year," and, in another chapter, that by 1973 "according to former Israeli government officials, the Israeli nuclear arsenal totaled at least twenty warheads"; his chapter on the Tunnel states a figure of more than twenty-five by the Yom Kippur War.²⁸ He wrote that "well-placed Israeli sources" said that technicians conducted "at least one successful low-yield nuclear test sometime in the mid-1960s at an underground cavern" in the Negev.²⁹

On September 22, 1979 the Vela 6911 satellite recorded a double flash over the South Indian Ocean; the technicians of the Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base had seen 41 earlier double flashes, each confirmed as a nuclear explosion.³⁰ Hersh wrote that "former Israeli government officials, whose information on other aspects of Dimona's activities has been corroborated," said the event was a low-yield Israeli artillery shell tested with the South African Navy observing and was the third such test over the ocean; he wrote that the presidential science adviser Frank Press wanted the review panel to buy time and that an aide recalled Press "did not want that panel to conclude there had been a nuclear explosion."³¹ The panel chaired by Jack Ruina, which included Richard Garwin, Luis Alvarez and Wolfgang Panofsky, concluded in May 1980 that the signal was more likely a meteoroid striking the satellite and sunlight reflecting off the ejected particles, while reports from Los Alamos National Laboratory, SRI International, Sandia National Laboratories, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Aerospace Corporation published in 2006 included several that held a nuclear test most probable.³⁰ See VELA Satellite and Nuclear Intelligence Panel.

Doctrine and deterrence

Hersh's title phrase, The Samson Option (GFE), is treated on its own page. The official Israeli formula quoted in the American record of 1969, that Israel "will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Near East," was, in the State Department paper, a position on which Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin "failed to go beyond this position, or to agree to any refinement of understanding of the word 'introduce,'" and Israel made no reply to the American interpretation, put in a letter of November 27, 1968 by Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Warnke, that it meant "possess."¹⁵

Footnotes

---

1. Cohen, Avner, and William Burr, "The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961," National Security Archive, Nuclear Proliferation International History Project and Center for Nonproliferation Studies, April 15, 2015 (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 510), with documents including SNIE 100-8-60 and the Eisenhower meeting record of December 19, 1960. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb510/ ↩︎

2. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991, chapter 3, "The French Connection." Full text read at https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option ↩︎

3. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 5, "Internal Wars" (French residents) and chapter 9, "Years of Pressure" (criticality in 1962). ↩︎

4. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 5, "Internal Wars" (Committee of Thirty); chapter 8, "A Presidential Struggle" (Feinberg); chapter 10, "The Samson Option" (annual cost). ↩︎

5. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 5, "Internal Wars," interview with Ian Smart, New York, July 23, 1989. ↩︎

6. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 4, "First Knowledge." ↩︎

7. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 6, "Going Public." ↩︎

8. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 12, "The Ambassador," pp. 163-164. ↩︎

9. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 8, "A Presidential Struggle," pp. 110-111. ↩︎

10. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 8 (Culler's account of the first inspection in 1962). ↩︎

11. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 8 (false control room; Culler) and chapter 10, pp. 131-132 (sod; Brugioni's comment is in the footnote on p. 131). ↩︎

12. Laird, Melvin R., memorandum for the Secretary of State, the Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and the Director of Central Intelligence, "Stopping the Introduction of Nuclear Weapons Into the Middle East," March 17, 1969, sanitized, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 189, document 6. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-06.pdf ↩︎

13. Munn, Robert H., to Sisco through Davies, "Scheduling of Visit to Dimona Reactor," June 12, 1970, EBB 189, document 29. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-29.pdf ↩︎

14. Department of State, memorandum of conversation, "1969 Dimona Visit," August 13, 1969, EBB 189, document 16b. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-16b.pdf ↩︎

15. Department of State, "Background: Israel's Nuclear Weapon and Missile Programs," enclosed in Executive Secretary Theodore L. Eliot to Henry Kissinger, September 19, 1969, EBB 189, document 21 (pp. 2 to 8, with drafting and clearance box). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-21.pdf ; Cohen, Avner, and William Burr, "Israel crosses the threshold," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, May/June 2006. ↩︎

16. Kissinger, Henry A., to the President, "Discussions with the Israelis on Nuclear Matters," October 7, 1969, EBB 189, document 22 (title and date; the National Security Archive's index describes it as written "in the wake of the Nixon-Meir meeting"). https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB189/IN-22.pdf ↩︎

17. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 16, "Prelude to War," on the end of the Culler inspections. ↩︎

18. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 305, Paper Submitted by the Control Group, undated (dated June 17, 1967 by the editors), with annex. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d305 ↩︎

19. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, vol. XIX, Document 326, Telegram 4311 from the Embassy in Israel (Barbour) to the Department of State, June 27, 1967. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v19/d326 ↩︎

20. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 11, p. 156. Sole source for the passages so cited; the official is unnamed. ↩︎

21. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 12, p. 168. Sole source for the passages so cited. ↩︎

22. Cohen, Avner. "Israel's Secret Plan to Nuke the Egyptian Desert." Politico Magazine, June 5, 2017, republished by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. https://nonproliferation.org/israels-secret-plan-to-nuke-the-egyptian-desert/. Sole source for the passages so cited; Cohen relays the testimony of Ya'akov. ↩︎

23. Wilson Center, "Wilson Center Archive Sheds New Light on 1967 Six-Day War," June 5, 2017. https://www.wilsoncenter.org/article/wilson-center-archive-sheds-new-light-1967-six-day-war ↩︎

24. Ginor, Isabella, and Gideon Remez. Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War. Yale University Press, 2007; their report of the 2007 Russian Air Force statement, https://www.historynewsnetwork.org/article/42140. Sole source for the overflights. ↩︎

25. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 15, "The Tunnel." ↩︎

26. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 5, "Internal Wars," and chapter 10 (Office of Special Tasks). ↩︎

27. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, p. 131 and its footnote. ↩︎

28. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 13, "An Israeli Decision" (1968 production; more than twenty-five bombs), and chapter 16, "Prelude to War" (at least twenty warheads by 1973). ↩︎

29. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 10, p. 131. ↩︎

30. Richelson, Jeffrey T., ed., "The Vela Incident: Nuclear Test or Meteoroid?" National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 190, May 5, 2006. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB190/index.htm ↩︎

31. Hersh, The Samson Option, chapter 20, "An Israeli Test," pp. 271-273. ↩︎