Israeli nuke agency on web

JERUSALEM – The world got its first official but unrevealing look inside Israel’s top-secret Dimona nuclear complex yesterday, courtesy of a new Internet site launched by the country’s Atomic Energy Commission.

But a colour photo of what Israel calls the Nuclear Research Centre Negev – and where outside experts suspect nuclear warheads have been made – kept the view limited to a clipped, tree-lined lawn leading to a white-domed reactor in the background. No people were in the picture, taken at the facility where Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, freed in April after serving a 17-year prison term for treason, once worked as a technician.Vanunu snapped his own photos – 60 of them – inside the Dimona reactor and gave them to Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper in 1986.Independent experts who examined the pictures concluded Israel had produced 100 to 200 nuclear warheads at the site.”The Nuclear Research Centre Negev was established at the end of 1959, and the research reactor in the centre was operated afterward,” the web site said, referring to the Dimona facility in Israel’s southern desert.In launching the web site, the commission followed the lead of another secretive Israeli agency, the Mossad intelligence service, which now advertises for spies over the Internet.International inspectors are not allowed into the Dimona reactor.Under a policy of “strategic ambiguity”, Israel does not acknowledge any nuclear weapons capabilities, saying only it will not be the first to introduce them to the Middle East.The UN nuclear watchdog chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, heads to Israel tomorrow to try to persuade the Jewish state to open up its nuclear programme.No visit to Dimona is on the agenda.A senior Israeli official said there would be no nuclear policy change until the regional situation improved.- Nampa-ReutersNo people were in the picture, taken at the facility where Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, freed in April after serving a 17-year prison term for treason, once worked as a technician.Vanunu snapped his own photos – 60 of them – inside the Dimona reactor and gave them to Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper in 1986.Independent experts who examined the pictures concluded Israel had produced 100 to 200 nuclear warheads at the site.”The Nuclear Research Centre Negev was established at the end of 1959, and the research reactor in the centre was operated afterward,” the web site said, referring to the Dimona facility in Israel’s southern desert.In launching the web site, the commission followed the lead of another secretive Israeli agency, the Mossad intelligence service, which now advertises for spies over the Internet.International inspectors are not allowed into the Dimona reactor.Under a policy of “strategic ambiguity”, Israel does not acknowledge any nuclear weapons capabilities, saying only it will not be the first to introduce them to the Middle East.The UN nuclear watchdog chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, heads to Israel tomorrow to try to persuade the Jewish state to open up its nuclear programme.No visit to Dimona is on the agenda.A senior Israeli official said there would be no nuclear policy change until the regional situation improved.- Nampa-Reuters