http://www.wisconsinproject.org/pubs/articles/1987/heavywatercheaters.htmBy Gary Milhollin
Foreign Policy
Winter 1987-1988, p. 100-119
Civilian nuclear exports are founded on two assumptions: No country will export a crucial item without requiring a pledge of peaceful use or use an item imported under such a pledge to make bombs. The same nuclear reaction that makes electricity makes weapons; the importer's pledge is the only barrier between the two. If countries receiving nuclear imports could freely convert them to arms, the nuclear exporting countries simply would be spreading atomic bomb factories across the world. The human race's prospects for controlling nuclear weapons would fall rapidly, and so would its chance of survival. To prevent proliferation, the supplier countries routinely re-quire two guarantees—a pledge of peaceful use and inspection of exported material, equipment, and technology. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is based in Vienna and comprises more than 100 member states, conducts the inspections.
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Any doubts left by these accounts should be dispelled by the case of Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli arms technician who worked at Dimona for 8 years. In September 1986 he detailed Israel's production techniques to the Sunday Times, providing almost 60 color photographs of what he said was Israel's underground bomb factory and convincing weapons experts on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that he was telling the truth. Ac-cording to Vanunu's data, Israel now has 100 to 200 advanced fission bombs, has mastered a thermonuclear design, and appears to have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. Instead of 8 kilograms of plutonium per year—what a 24-megawatt reactor would normally make—Dimona, according to Vanunu, is producing 40 kilograms per year, which is enough for 10 advanced fission bombs. Dimona is also making tritium and deuterium, the thermonuclear bomb ingredients. After telling his story to the Sunday Times, Vanunu disappeared on September 30. He turned up 2 weeks later in an Israeli jail charged with espionage and other crimes. Vanunu said he was kidnaped in Rome, though Israel refuses to say how he was arrested.
Vanunu's story is either a spectacular security leak or the political equivalent of a nuclear test. If the story is a plant, Israel could be telling its neighbors once again that the rumors about its bombs are true, as it did after it destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor in June 1981, when former Defense Minister and Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan told the New York Times, "We do have the capacity to produce nuclear weapons, and if the Arabs are willing to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, then Israel should not be too late in having nuclear weapons, too."3 In short, there is not much doubt that Israel has made nuclear weapons. The remaining question is whether Israel used plutonium made with Norwegian or U.S. heavy water.
To understand the transfer of heavy water to Israel, several points must be kept in mind:
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The reactor at Dimona is Israel's only means of making plutonium, and plutonium is Israel's primary nuclear weapon material. Dimona also is the only facility in Israel that uses heavy water in metric ton quantities. When Dimona opened in 1963, the world's main heavy water suppliers were the United States and Norway. Israel was producing heavy water only in laboratory quantities. Therefore, it was physically impossible to start Dimona without U.S. or Norwegian heavy water.
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France and Canada also possessed heavy water in the early 1960s, but Canada has never ex-ported any heavy water to Israel, and all of France's heavy water had been imported previously from the United States and Norway. France pledged not to re-export it without per-mission. Thus even if Israel had received a secret shipment from France, the water would have been diverted illegally from U.S. or Norwegian stocks, giving Israel no right to use it.
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Therefore, all the heavy water Israel imported for Dimona must have come initially from the United States and Norway.
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Reactors like the one at Dimona lose only about .5 per cent of their heavy water each year. So if U.S. or Norwegian heavy water went to Dimona in 1963, more than 85 per cent of it is still there today.
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"A Swiss man suspected of being involved in the world's biggest nuclear smuggling ring"
Until these Swiss guys have helped build 300 bombs, they are not the biggest smugglers, by any means. This article is long and very detailed leaving little doubt who are the largest violators of the NPT by way of allowing, and even aiding, smuggled material to be made into actual nuclear bombs.
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