that safety procedures are alarmingly inadequate, and that workers be-
come contaminated, being exposed to high levels of radiation.
Israel has always encountered problems acquiring uranium for the
reactor because it has not signed the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).
However, it was able to develop some capability of extracting ura-
nium from phosphate ores at Dimona; it has also used “gray market”
channels to fuel the reactor. In 1965 up to 220 pounds (100 kilo-
grams) of highly enriched uranium was lost from the U.S.-based Nu-
clear Materials and Equipment Corporation(NUMEC) in Apollo,
Pennsylvania; the existence of certain nuclear materials deals be-
tween the NUMEC chairman and Israel led to the belief that the ura-
nium had gone to Israel. Furthermore, in 1968 a 200-ton load of ura-
nium (yellowcake) was stolen (or just delivered) from the German
vessel Scheersberg Aas part of the Plumbat Operation.
Cooperation between Israel and South Africa on nuclear technol-
ogy seems to have started around 1967 and lasted through the 1970s
and 1980s, during which years South Africa was a principal uranium
supplier for Dimona. Israel might have played a part in a nuclear
weapons test in the Indian Ocean on 22 September 1979 that is gen-
erally believed to have been a joint South African–Israeli test.
Israel has long had close relations with the United States. In 1955,
before the contract for Dimona was signed, the United States agreed
to sell a 5-MW swimming-pool research reactor to an Israeli facility
at Nahal Soreq, south of Tel Aviv. But the United States obliged Israel
to accept safeguards because it supplied highly enriched uranium fuel
for the reactor.
With the 1960 official announcement that Israel had a reactor for
“peaceful purposes,” relations between the United States and Israel
cooled over the issue. Publicly the United States accepted Israel’s
declaration of peaceful purposes, but privately it exerted pressure. As
a result, Israel finally committed to admit U.S. inspection teams once
a year. These inspections took place between 1962 and 1969 but were
in fact a sham. The inspectors saw only above-ground parts of the fa-
cility, with simulated control rooms; access to the underground
rooms was hidden from them, and it was there, on many levels, that
the plutonium reprocessing actually took place.
The U.S. inspectors could report no obvious scientific research or
civilian nuclear power program was evident to justify such a large re-218 • NUCLEAR WEAPONS PROGRAM06-102 (03) H-P.qxd 3/24/06 7:25 AM Page 218