Israeli: Syrian Site Was Nuke Bomb Factory, Not Reactor
JERUSALEM (AP) - A Syrian site bombed by Israel in September was probably a plant for assembling a nuclear bomb, an Israeli nuclear expert said Thursday, challenging other analysts’ conclusions that it housed a North Korean- style nuclear reactor.
Tel Aviv University chemistry professor Uzi Even, who worked in the past at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, said satellite pictures of the site taken before the Israeli strike on Sept. 6 showed no sign of the cooling towers and chimneys characteristic of reactors.
Even said the absence of telltale features of a reactor convinced him the building must have housed something else. And a rush by the Syrians after the attack to bury the site under tons of soil suggests the facility was a plutonium processing plant and they were trying to smother lethal doses of radiation leaking out.
Israel has maintained an almost total official silence over the strike, which Syria said hit an unused military installation. But foreign media reports, some quoting unidentified U.S. officials, have said the strike hit a nuclear facility made with North Korean help and modeled on the North’s Yongbyon reactor.
Damascus denies it has an undeclared nuclear program, and North Korea has said it was not involved in any Syrian nuclear project.
Last month, American analyst David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said commercial satellite images taken before and after the Israeli raid supported suspicions that the target was indeed a reactor and that the site was given a hasty cleanup by the Syrians to remove incriminating evidence.
Albright saw a clue in the fact that the structure was roofed at an early stage in its construction.
Other analysts have said the satellite images are too grainy to make any conclusive judgment.
But in an interview Thursday with the Haaretz newspaper—which first reported his assessment—Even compared pictures of a North Korean reactor at Yongbyon, in which a cooling tower with steam rising from it can clearly be seen, with the Syrian images, where no such structure appears.
Even told The Associated Press that another piece of evidence against the reactor theory was that satellite pictures of the Syrian installation taken since 2003 showed no sign of a plutonium separation facility, which prepares fuel for a nuclear reactor—typically a large structure with visible ventilation openings.
“It’s very difficult to hide a separation plant,” he said. “It’s more difficult to hide a separation plant than to hide a nuclear reactor,” Even added.
“In Yongbyon, the supposed sister facility in North Korea, you can see all those signs that I am pointing out that are missing in the Syrian place,” Even said. “You can see the chimneys, you can see the ventilation, you can see the cooling towers, you can see the separation plant. All that is missing from this building in Syria.”
Even said he believes the Syrian cleanup, in which large quantities of soil were bulldozed over the site, was an attempt to smother lethal radiation from a plutonium processing plant.
“I have no information, only an assessment, but I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely a factory for assembling the bomb,” he told Haaretz.
“Somebody made a lot of effort to bury deeply whatever remains of this facility,” he told The AP. “Not just to hide it but to pile up a large mound of dirt on top of it.”
Even said Syrian authorities might have taken similar cleanup action if the site had held chemical or biological weapons. But it would not have made sense for Israel to have taken the military and diplomatic risk of attacking such a facility, long a known element of Syria’s arsenal.
“We know already that the Syrians have in place armed missiles with chemical weapons,” he said. “They are already well-equipped in that department.”
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Published on Friday, November 2, 2007 by The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
‘USAF Struck Syrian Nuclear Site’
by Jerusalem Post Staff
The September 6 raid over Syria was carried out by the US Air Force, the Al-Jazeera Web site reported Friday. The Web site quoted Israeli and Arab sources as saying that two strategic US jets armed with tactical nuclear weapons carried out an attack on a nuclear site under construction.
The sources were quoted as saying that Israeli F-15 and F-16 jets provided cover for the US planes.
The sources added that each US plane carried one tactical nuclear weapon and that the site was hit by one bomb and was totally destroyed.
At the beginning of October, Israel’s military censor began to allow the local media to report on the raid without attributing their report to foreign sources. Nevertheless, details of the strike have remained clouded in mystery.
On October 28, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the cabinet that he had apologized to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan if Israel violated Turkish airspace during a strike on an alleged nuclear facility in Syria last month.
In a carefully worded statement that was given to reporters after the cabinet meeting, Olmert said: “In my conversation with the Turkish prime minister, I told him that if Israeli planes indeed penetrated Turkish airspace, then there was no intention thereby, either in advance or in any case, to - in any way - violate or undermine Turkish sovereignty, which we respect.”
The New York Times reported on October 13 that Israeli planes struck at what US and Israeli intelligence believed was a partly constructed nuclear reactor in Syria on September 6, citing American and foreign officials who had seen the relevant intelligence reports.
According to the report, Israel carried out the report to send a message that it would not tolerate even a nuclear program in its initial stages of construction in any neighboring state.
On October 17, Syria denied that one of its representatives to the United Nations told a panel that an Israeli air strike hit a Syrian nuclear facility and added that “such facilities do not exist in Syria.”
A UN document released by the press office had provided an account of a meeting of the First Committee, Disarmament and International Security, in New York, and paraphrased an unnamed Syrian representative as saying that a nuclear facility was hit by the raid.
However, the state-run Syrian Arab News Agency, SANA said media reports, apparently based on a UN press release, misquoted the Syrian diplomat.
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:11 pmWhat may be clear is that either Israel or the U.S. engaged in a preemptive strike inside Syria, and that they overflew Turkish airspace in this unannounced raid. It also seems very possible that this was a test run of a combined U.S. - Israeli mission for facilities inside Iran. Or as likely, a very direct message to Iran that they could be next.
November 22nd, 2007 at 3:26 pmBomb, bomb, bomb,
November 23rd, 2007 at 12:49 amBomb, bomb Assad;
etc.