Authors: Rodger W. Claire
But it
was
fooled. Completely. Had the inspectors ventured to check the reactor core, they would have discovered huge stores of heavy water, a tip-off that the reactor was being used far above its stated capacity and generating great quantities of potential plutonium. To avoid that happenstance, Israel claimed that the reactor was in full operation—far too dangerous to allow inspectors into the core.
In truth, in view of Israel’s ultimate intentions, even the “real” reactor was something of a Trojan horse. Israel was not so much interested in the energy produced by the reactor, which was converted into heat and steam and, ultimately, electricity, but in the
by-product
of the energy’s production—the spent uranium fuel from which could be extracted plutonium, the essential ingredient of an atomic bomb.
The physics involved in a nuclear reactor is actually fairly basic. A reactor consists of a containment vessel, bundles of fuel rods filled with pellets of uranium 235, control rods (typically cadmium or boron, which absorb neutrons), heavy water (deuterium oxide produced from normal water by a process involving electrolysis), loops of pipe to carry superheated water, and a steam turbine outside the reactor vessel to produce electricity. The primary energy comes from the fissioning, or nuclear chain reaction, caused by the uranium 235 atoms, which, in concentrated and contained form, emit neutrons traveling at the speed of light. These neutrons collide with other highly charged U235 atoms, splitting the atoms’ centers, or nuclei, smashing them into fragments, and, at the same time, releasing heat and even more neutrons from the separated nuclei. The free neutrons collide with yet more atoms, creating a chain reaction that, if left unchecked, ultimately results in a nuclear explosion. But in a nuclear reactor, the fuel rods and pellets of uranium are immersed in heavy water, which absorbs neutrons and modulates the fissioning. In addition, control rods are inserted between the fuel rods to absorb even more neutrons, slowing down the rate of the splitting atoms or, when withdrawn, speeding the rate of fissioning. The heavy water and control rods allow nuclear techs to sustain what is essentially a controlled nuclear reaction. The immense heat produced by the continually fissioning uranium is transferred to the pipes of freshwater, which run through the reactor. Inside the pipes the water becomes steam, which is then used to drive the electric turbines outside the reactor.
What was important about a nuclear reactor in terms of building an atomic bomb was the by-product—the spent uranium fuel pellets inside the rods. While being bombarded with neutrons, the uranium becomes enriched with plutonium isotopes. This plutonium can be extracted from the spent uranium by a chemical process, then fabricated by a special machine into a metal form.
This was exactly what Israel was doing. Each weekly cycle in Dimona produced about nine “buttons” of pure plutonium, or 1.2 kilograms. It required roughly 11 kilograms of plutonium to produce one atomic bomb. Thus, approximately every ten weeks Israeli engineers had enough plutonium to create one more atomic bomb. For use in a bomb, the plutonium was shaped into a perfect sphere and surrounded by a high-explosive material. Triggered to explode inward in a precise sequence of nanoseconds, the blast would compress, or implode, the plutonium core into itself. The plutonium, like the U235 in the nuclear reactor, would begin discharging neutrons, but, unlike the controlled fissioning in the reactor, the neutrons in the bomb would discharge at an immensely faster rate—faster than they could escape from the core. Ultimately the pent-up energy would go “supercritical,” bursting outward and producing the immense explosion and familiar mushroom cloud of the classic atomic blast.
A process of “boosting,” that is, of inserting tritium extracted from heavy water into the warhead at the moment of fission, would flood the core with yet more neutrons and add an extra nuclear kick, dramatically increasing the bomb’s explosive “yield.” By the early fifties, physicists were already developing the so-called hydrogen bomb, a two-stage device that used the fission from an atomic bomb to compress and trigger the fusion of a second compartment of deuterium, a hydrogen isotope that burns as the primary fuel of the sun.
Israel’s atomic bomb–making facilities were far too expansive to hide on the ground at Dimona, even with the fake control rooms. So the Israelis went underground. Near the Dimona reactor was a nondescript, two-story, windowless administration building sheltering an employee canteen, a shower room, an air filtration system, and a storage area. On the second floor was a secret bank of elevators, bricked over and hidden from view of the inspectors. The elevator shaft sank eighty feet beneath the floor to a secret, six-story underground laboratory known to the Israeli workers as “the Tunnel.” A labyrinth of underground rooms and units, the Tunnel contained a chemical reprocessing plant and bomb factory where, beginning in 1965, the weapons-grade plutonium extracted from the Dimona reactor was fashioned into atomic warheads. Tritium extraction was done in Unit 92. Overlooking four floors where the plutonium was chemically extracted from the spent uranium rods, which cooled for weeks in water tanks, was a huge glass-enclosed control room, nicknamed Golda’s Balcony in honor of the famed Israeli prime minister who frequently visited Dimona after taking office in 1969.
The bomb factory’s existence would not be corroborated for another twenty years. But by the mid-sixties, reports of the reactor on the surface had made U.S. intelligence agencies suspicious. Early in 1965 the AEC and the CIA began rethinking the conventional wisdom concerning Dimona. After a decade of turning a blind eye on the somewhat troubling question of Israel’s real intentions regarding the ultimate use of its nuclear reactor, the Defense Information Agency (DIA), AEC, and CIA began anxiously speculating on the primary source of Israel’s U235 fuel—especially after two hundred pounds of enriched uranium shipped by Westinghouse Company and the U.S. Navy to a small Pennsylvania nuclear processing and fabrication firm called Nuclear Materials & Equipment Corporation turned up missing.
What flagged the attention of the AEC and CIA was the fact the firm’s founder and director, Zalman Shapiro, the American son of a rabbi and Holocaust survivor, was a well-known, outspoken supporter of the Jewish state as well as an active member in the Zionist Organization of America. Even more intriguing, Shapiro counted among his closest friends Ernst Bergmann, the nation’s leading nuclear scientist. After an investigation but without a lot of hard proof, the AEC charged that Shapiro’s company, NUMEC, had diverted the missing uranium to Israel and then attempted to bury the missing inventory in its convoluted bookkeeping procedures. Shapiro vehemently denied all the charges, as did Israel. The AEC, FBI, CIA, even Congress conducted a panoply of audits, reviews, and criminal investigations for ten years. But in the end the case came down to supposition and some suspicious transactions. No hard evidence was ever uncovered that NUMEC had diverted anything to Israel, much less U235. The lack of proof, however, did little to save Shapiro’s reputation. He lived out his life marked as a suspected agent for Israel.
The matter was soon officially forgotten. Whatever the truth, by the end of the decade, how Israel had attained enriched uranium was no longer of interest to anyone—except Saddam Hussein.
By 1971, Khidhir Hamza had been assigned to review and evaluate the history and operations of the Nuclear Research Center at al-Tuwaitha and to produce a definitive Atomic Energy Progress Report. Before long, Hamza found himself involved in every aspect of Atomic Energy’s business. What he discovered surprised him: for all Hussein’s obsession with control, it was clear that Iraq had been taken for a ride by the superpowers. In the early sixties, Iraq’s Atomic Energy (AE), under directions from Hussein, had purchased a small five-megawatt nuclear reactor from the Soviet Union. The sale was of little concern to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because the reactor was too small to produce weapons-grade uranium, which could then be used to create an atomic bomb. In fact, the Soviets had refused to sell Hussein anything larger than the five-megawatt reactor. Ironically, the Russians, unlike many of the West’s democracies, especially the aggressively competitive French, Germans, and Italians, turned out to be strict enforcers of the international nuclear nonproliferation treaties. However, seeing the perfect opportunity to make a good profit off of what they considered an unsophisticated and technologically impoverished Arab satellite state, the Soviets, in Hamza’s estimation, had put together a package of mostly outdated nuclear and power-generating equipment, including, of all things, a boiler dating back to the 1930s. Bizarrely, instead of fixing an exact price tag on the reactor and for all of its various facilities and equipment, the Soviet nuclear agency charged Iraq by the
ton.
Accordingly, the Russians heaped as much equipment onto the deal as they could, padding the service contract with scores of redundant engineers, technicians, and untrained hacks who collected large paychecks for doing virtually nothing.
Padding the payroll and shipping ancillary machinery was easy, since it was never clear even to Iraqi administrators what exactly the Nuclear Research Center was supposed to be doing. Sitting atop the second largest oil deposit in the world, Iraq was hardly in need of nuclear power to run its electrical plants. In recent years, in fact, Atomic Energy had been used mostly to screen Saddam’s dinner. Hussein demanded only the best of everything when it came to his personal comforts. The Iraqi leader had his food flown in fresh daily from Paris. On its sojourn to his state-of-the-art kitchens, the finest French beef, lamb, lobster, and shrimp were routed first to technicians at Atomic Energy, where the institute’s multimillion-dollar X-ray and chemical-processing machines were used to check the victuals for poisons or dangerous metals that could harm the Great Uncle, as Saddam had taken to being called by loyal party minions. At the slightest doubt, the suspect delicacy would be sloughed off to local markets or restaurants. One well-known story recounted by Hamza recalled a day when Saddam came down with diarrhea. A squad of security guards stormed into the palace kitchen and held the cooks for hours kneeling on the floor with gun barrels pressed to their heads until a doctor examined the leader and declared it a common virus.
Hamza found that within a year of its purchase, the Russian reactor had begun to leak radioactive contaminated water. It seemed that when it came time to clean the reactor core, a normal process of maintenance, the Soviet technicians and sales personnel claimed that maintenance was not covered in the original contract. “This is your responsibility, not ours,” the on-site engineers informed the Iraqis. The Iraqi technicians at Atomic Energy had no experience in maintaining nuclear reactors. Not one of its members had the vaguest idea of how to clean the inside of a nuclear reactor. Certainly there were no tools or provisions for such an undertaking at al-Tuwaitha.
Atomic Energy administrators elected to contract the work out to a private industrial cleaning service in Baghdad. The workers at the company were experienced in cleaning and scrubbing industrial warehouses and fabrication plants, even chemical laboratories and production facilities. But not one of them had ever seen a reactor before, much less cleaned one. In the end the maintenance workers relied on what they had always done. They entered the mathematically smooth, precisely engineered seamless environment of the reactor core and began scouring the pristine walls with wire brushes and industrial cleaning fluids, as though the reactor were just another dirty factory floor in need of a good scrubbing. Unbeknownst to the maintenance crew, or to the Iraqi engineers and nuclear techs who ran the reactor, the wire brushes scratched and grooved the pristine surfaces of the core’s containment vessel. These minute divots and engraved lines created weak spots on the surface. When the reactor was activated again, the superheated steam and extreme temperatures soon corroded the breaches in the surface, eating away at the material until the core began leaking the moderating water around the fuel rods. When Atomic Energy complained to the Soviet techs that the core was leaking, the Russian liaison officers countered that they had had nothing to do with maintaining the reactor core and that the decision to hire an outside, incompetent firm to undertake such a delicate process was solely the responsibility of the Iraqis. Iraq was left with an undersized and now unusable reactor.
Khidhir Hamza put all the details of the ten-year Soviet administration and shepherding of Iraq’s nuclear energy programs in his report. He handed the finished document to AE at the end of 1971. The reaction to the report was not long in coming. Saddam Hussein may have been a bit of a rube when it came to nuclear technology dealmaking, but he was a fast learner. Just months after receiving Hamza’s paper, Hussein in early 1972 ordered all Soviet personnel out of the country. Simultaneously he froze the balance of the remaining payments due the Soviet Union and directed that it be held in escrow according to international procedure. He also informed Moscow that he would pay only five hundred thousand dollars—and he would pay that balance in Russia’s own rapidly falling rubles. The deal was “take it or leave it.”
His part in the humiliation of the Soviets made Hamza something of a local hero at Atomic Energy. The engineer was given a raise and increased responsibilities. The Research Center’s new director, Husham Sharif, a small, cultured man who had replaced the lower-bred Attia, began currying favor with his new star scientist. Even Dr. Moyesser al-Mallah, the secretary general of Atomic Energy, began dropping by Khidhir Hamza’s small office for an occasional cup of tea. One evening, curiously, al-Mallah requested that Hamza and Sharif come home with him after work so they could talk in “private.” Hamza drove to the man’s house, located in an upscale suburb of Baghdad reserved for officials of the Ba’th Party. He felt anxious, wondering what al-Mallah could want that was so important they needed to meet in secret. Hamza and Sharif settled into al-Mallah’s comfortable den and began the usual office chitchat when Sharif suddenly changed the subject.