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Scientists: Schizophrenia drug can cure SARS
http://www2.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2005-06/20/content_452887.htm
Thank you Lee.
For many reasons this was the best page you have sent in a long time, but I still
would like more info & discussion of Israelis nuclear weapons production
systems running concurrent with propaganda that obfuscates the possibility all
nations have the same right to any weapons they wish to maintain there sovrignity...
http://youwillanyway.blogspot.com/2005_02_01_archive.html
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=still%20no%20discussion%20of%20Israel's%20nuclear-weapons%20production%20systems%20running&rlz=1R2DMUS_enUS327&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wi
Israeli nuclear weapons
http://newscompass.blogspot.com
Israeli Nukes
http://diosa.net
Behind me is Israel's nuclear
http://planetisrael.blogspot.com
Exclusive: Secret US-Israel
http://habayitah.blogspot.com
Israel's nuclear weapons
http://randompottins.blogspot.com
While the existence of Israeli
http://paulnaidu.blogspot.com
Israeli nuclear weapons.
http://waynemadsenreport.com
Dimona Nuclear Weapons
http://newscompass.blogspot.com
1950s when Israel launched
http://thecornerreport.com
The Israeli death toll stood
http://rockthetruth2.blogspot.com
suspend any production
http://friday-lunch-club.blogspot.com
half that many still left
http://youwillanyway.blogspot.com
and still the embodiment
http://uprootedpalestinians.blogspo
Israel, nuclear weapons
http://themediablog.blogspot.com
You can still see it here,
http://jihadwatch.org
production systems,
http://acceleratingfuture.com
and nuclear weapons can
http://objectivismonline.net
Israel's ruling circles barely
http://tzvee.blogspot.com
Israel's Nuclear Program - Dimona Facility in Negev Desert
UPDATE !! Breaking News : Former Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu has been freed after spending nearly 18 years in
jail for leaking atomic weapons secrets. Vanunu was released from Shikma prison in Ashkelon after completing his sentence for treason.
He is not allowed to have a passport, is forbidden to approach ports and airports, and has been told not to talk to foreigners without
permission. Read here for more
Transcribed from Website of Federation of American Scientists (FAS)
In 1949, HEMED GIMMEL a special unit of the IDF's Science Corps, began a two-year geological survey of the Negev desert with
an eye toward the discovery of uranium reserves. Although no significant sources of uranium were found, recoverable amounts were
located in phosphate deposits.
The program took another step forward with the creation of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission (IAEC) in 1952. Its chairman,
Ernst David Bergmann, had long advocated an Israeli bomb as the best way to ensure "that we shall never again be led as lambs to
the slaughter."
Bergmann was also head of the Ministry of Defense's Research and Infrastructure Division (known by its Hebrew acronym, EMET),
which had taken over the HEMED research centers (HEMED GIMMEL among them, now renamed Machon 4) as part of a reorganization.
Under Bergmann, the line between the IAEC and EMET blurred to the point that Machon 4 functioned essentially as the chief laboratory
for the IAEC.
By 1953, Machon 4 had not only perfected a process for extracting the uranium found in the Negev, but had also developed a new method
of producing heavy water, providing Israel with an indigenous capability to produce some of the most important nuclear materials.
For reactor design and construction, Israel sought the assistance of France. Nuclear cooperation between the two nations dates back as
far as early 1950's, when construction began on France's 40MWt heavy water reactor and a chemical reprocessing plant at Marcoule.
France was a natural partner for Israel and both governments saw an independent nuclear option as a means by which they could maintain
a degree of autonomy in the bipolar environment of the cold war.
In the fall of 1956, France agreed to provide Israel with an 18 MWt research reactor. However, the onset of the Suez Crisis a few weeks
later changed the situation dramatically.
Following Egypt's closure of the Suez Canal in July, France and Britain had agreed with Israel that the latter should provoke a war with
Egypt to provide the European nations with the pretext to send in their troops as peacekeepers to occupy and reopen the canal zone.
In the wake of the Suez Crisis, the Soviet Union made a thinly veiled threat against the three nations.
This episode not only enhanced the Israeli view that an independent nuclear capability was needed to prevent reliance on potentially unreliable
allies, but also led to a sense of debt among French leaders that they had failed to fulfill commitments made to a partner.
French premier Guy Mollet is even quoted as saying privately that France "owed" the bomb to Israel.
On 3 October 1957, France and Israel signed a revised agreement calling for France to build a 24 MWt reactor (although the cooling systems
and waste facilities were designed to handle three times that power) and, in protocols that were not committed to paper, a chemical reprocessing
plant.
This complex was constructed in secret, and outside the IAEA inspection regime, by French and Israeli technicians at Dimona, in the Negev
desert under the leadership of Col. Manes Pratt of the IDF Ordinance Corps.
A satellite photo of Dimona. Red squares indicate the development of the nuclear reactor over the past 30 years
Both the scale of the project and the secrecy involved made the construction of Dimona a massive undertaking.
A new intelligence agency, the Office of Science Liasons,(LEKEM) was created to provide security and intelligence for the project. At the
height construction, some 1,500 Israelis some French workers were employed building Dimona.
To maintain secrecy, French customs officials were told that the largest of the reactor components, such as the reactor tank, were part of
a desalinization plant bound for Latin America.
In addition, after buying heavy water from Norway on the condition that it not be transferred to a third country, the French Air Force secretly
flew as much as four tons of the substance to Israel.
Trouble arose in May 1960, when France began to pressure Israel to make the project public and to submit to international inspections of the
site, threatening to withhold the reactor fuel unless they did.
President de Gaulle was concerned that the inevitable scandal following any revelations about French assistance with the project, especially
the chemical reprocessing plant, would have negative repercussions for France's international position, already on shaky ground because of
its war in Algeria.
At a subsequent meeting with Ben-Gurion, de Gaulle offered to sell Israel fighter aircraft in exchange for stopping work on the reprocessing
plant, and came away from the meeting convinced that the matter was closed. It was not.
Over the next few months, Israel worked out a compromise. France would supply the uranium and components already placed on order and
would not insist on international inspections.
In return, Israel would assure France that they had no intention of making atomic weapons, would not reprocess any plutonium, and would
reveal the existence of the reactor, which would be completed without French assistance.
In reality, not much changed - French contractors finished work on the reactor and reprocessing plant, uranium fuel was delivered and the
reactor went critical in 1964.
The Dimona reactor.
The United States first became aware of Dimona's existence after U-2 overflights in 1958 captured the facility's construction, but it was
not identified as a nuclear site until two years later. The complex was variously explained as a textile plant, an agricultural station, and a
metallurgical research facility, until David Ben-Gurion stated in December 1960 that Dimona complex was a nuclear research center
built for "peaceful purposes."
There followed two decades in which the United States, through a combination of benign neglect, erroneous analysis, and successful
Israeli deception, failed to discern first the details of Israel's nuclear program.
As early as 8 December 1960, the CIA issued a report outlining Dimona's implications for nuclear proliferation, and the CIA station in
Tel Aviv had determined by the mid-1960s that the Israeli nuclear weapons program was an established and irreversible fact.
United States inspectors visited Dimona seven times during the 1960s, but they were unable to obtain an accurate picture of the activities
carried out there, largely due to tight Israeli control over the timing and agenda of the visits. The Israelis went so far as to install false
control room panels and to brick over elevators and hallways that accessed certain areas of the facility.
The inspectors were able to report that there was no clear scientific research or civilian nuclear power program justifying such a large
reactor - circumstantial evidence of the Israeli bomb program - but found no evidence of "weapons related activities" such as the existence
of a plutonium reprocessing plant.
Although the United States government did not encourage or approve of the Israeli nuclear program, it also did nothing to stop it.
Walworth Barbour, US ambassador to Israel from 1961-73, the bomb program's crucial years, primarily saw his job as being to insulate
the President from facts which might compel him to act on the nuclear issue, alledgedly saying at one point that "The President did not
send me there to give him problems. He does not want to be told any bad news."
After the 1967 war, Barbour even put a stop to military attachés' intelligence collection efforts around Dimona.
Even when Barbour did authorize forwarding information, as he did in 1966 when embassy staff learned that Israel was beginning to put
nuclear warheads in missiles, the message seemed to disappear into the bureaucracy and was never acted upon.
(Note: Today there is a American International School near Yovel in Israel established with the assistance of the American Embassy and
State Department in 1958 renamed Walworth Barbour American International School)
In early 1968, the CIA issued a report concluding that Israel had successfully started production of uclear weapons.
This estimate, however, was based on an informal conversation between Carl Duckett, head of the CIA's Office of Science and Technology,
and Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb. Teller said that, based on conversations with friends in the Israeli scientific and defense
establishment, he had concluded that Israel was capable of building the bomb, and that the CIA should not wait for an Israeli test to make
a final assessment because that test would never be carried out.
CIA estimates of the Israeli arsenal's size did not improve with time.
In 1974, Duckett estimated that Israel had between ten and twenty nuclear weapons. The upper bound was derived from CIA speculation
regarding the number of possible Israeli targets, and not from any specific intelligence. Because this target list was presumed to be relatively
static, this remained the official American estimate until the early 1980s.
The actual size and composition of Israel's nuclear stockpile is uncertain, and is the subject of various estimates and reports. It is widely
reported that Israel had two bombs in 1967, and that Prime Minister Eshkol ordered them armed in Israel's first nuclear alert during the
Six-Day War.
It is also reported that, fearing defeat in the October 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Israelis assembled 13 twenty-kiloton atomic
bombs. Israel could potentially have produced a few dozen nuclear warheads in the period 1970-1980, and might have
possessed 100 to 200 warheads by the mid-1990s.
In 1986 descriptions and photographs of Israeli nuclear warheads were published
in the London Sunday Times of a purported underground
bomb factory. The photographs were taken by Mordechai Vanunu, a dismissed Israeli nuclear
technician. His information led some experts
to conclude that Israel had a stockpile of 100 to 200 nuclear devices at that time.
By the late 1990s the U.S. Intelligence Community estimated that Israel possessed between 75-130 weapons, based on production estimates.
The stockpile would certainly include warheads for mobile Jericho-1 and Jericho-2 missiles, as well as bombs for Israeli aircraft, and may
include other tactical nuclear weapons of various types.
The Dimona nuclear reactor is the source of plutonium for Israeli nuclear weapons, and the number of nuclear weapons that could have been
produced by Israel can be estimated on the basis of the power level of this reactor. Information made public in 1986 by Mordechai Vanunu
indicated that at that time, weapons grade plutonium was being produced at a rate of about 40 kilograms annually.
If this figure corresponded with the steady-state capacity of the entire Dimona facility, analysts suggested that the reactor might have a power
level of at least 150 megawatts, about twice the power level at which is was believed to be operating around 1970. To accomodate this higher
power level, analysts had suggested that Israel had constructed an enlarged cooling system.
An alternative interpretation of the information supplied by Vanunu was that the reactor's power level had remained at about 75 megawatts, and
that the production rate of plutonium in the early 1980s reflected a backlog of previously generated material.
The upper and lower plausible limits on Israel's stockpile may be bounded by considering several variables, several of which are generic to any
nuclear weapons program. The reactor may have operated an average of between 200 and 300 days annually, and produced approximately 0.9
to 1.0 grams of plutonium for each thermal megawatt day. Israel may use between 4 and 5 kilograms of plutonium per weapon [5 kilograms is
a conservative estimate, and Vanunu reported that Israeli weapons used 4 kg].
A plutonium separation plant's control room,with equipment recognizable by nuclear scientists as part of a nuclear weapons production facility.
Dimona Nuclear Weapons Facility Machon 2, Negrev Desert, Israel
The key variable that is specific to Israel is the power level of the reactor, which is variously reported to be at least 75 MWt and possibly as
high as 200 MWt. New high-resolution satellite imagery provides important insight this matter. The imagery of the Dimona nuclear reactor was
acquired by the Public Eye Project of the Federation of American Scientists from Space Imaging Corporation's IKONOS satellite.
The cooling towers associated with the Dimona reactor are clearly visible and identifiable
in satellite imagery.
Comparison of recently acquired commercial IKONOS imagery with declassified American CORONA reconnaissance satellite imagery indicates
that no new cooling towers were constructed in the years between 1971 and 2000. This strongly suggests that the reactor's power level has not been
increased significantly during this period. This would suggest an annual production rate of plutonium of about 20 kilograms.
Based on plausible upper and lower bounds of the operating practices at the reactor, Israel could have thus produced
enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons.
Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on 2 November 1966 [possibly at Al-Naqab in the Negev].
There is no evidence that Israel has ever carried out a nuclear test, although many observers speculated that a suspected
nuclear explosion in the southern Indian Ocean in 1979 was a joint South African-Israeli test.
Go to Latest Posting
http://newscompass.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_archive.html
Still no discussion of Israel's nuclear-weapons production systems running - Google Images
Selective Vision: Iran, Israel and Nuclear Arms Mar 17, 2009 ...
There is no in-depth reporting or analysis of Israel`s hugely ...Worse still, Amnesty had this
to say on the claim that rockets have been ... Estimates for Israel's nuclear weapons stockpile
range from 70 to 400 warheads. ... Where is the in-depth discussion that Israel might have a reason to ...
http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=618722 -
http://newscompass.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_archive.html
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