Ignoring all opposition, Ben-Gurion gave the order for the reactor to be sited in the Negev Desert, close to the bleak, sand-blown settlement at Dimona. Once a staging post on the camel caravan route between Cairo and Jerusalem, Dimona had long become a place time had passed by. Few maps marked its position in the desert south of Tel Aviv. But from now on no mapmaker would be allowed to pinpoint the location of Israel’s first faltering steps into the nuclear age.
Dimona’s silver dome—beneath which was the reactor—rose above the desert heat. Kirya le Mehekar Gariny, Dimona’s Hebrew name, employed over 2,500 scientists and technicians. They worked within the most fortified plant on earth. The sand around the perimeter fences was continuously checked for signs of intruders. Pilots knew that any aircraft flying within a five-mile air exclusion zone could be shot down. Engineers had bulldozed an eighty-foot-deep chamber to house the reactor, part of an underground complex known as Machon Two. At its core was the separating/reprocessing plant that had been labeled “textile machinery” when shipped from France.
By itself the reactor could not provide Israel with a nuclear bomb. To produce one required fissionable material, uranium or plutonium. The handful of nuclear powers had agreed among themselves never to provide as much as a gram of either substance to all those outside their exclusive “club.” Imposing though it was, the reactor at Dimona was little more than a showpiece until it received fissionable materials.
Three months after the reactor had been installed, a small nuclear material processing company opened for business in a converted World War II steel plant in the unappealing town of Apollo, Pennsylvania. The company was called the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, Numec. Its chief executive was Dr. Salman Shapiro.
On LAKAM’s computer database of prominent American Jews with a scientific background, Shapiro was also listed as a prominent fund-raiser for Israel. Rafi Eitan knew he had found a potential answer to how to provide the Dimona reactor with fissionable material. He ordered a full check made into the background of Shapiro and every member of the plant staff. The investigation was entrusted to the
The inquiry launched, Rafi Eitan continued to immerse himself in a story that had switched from the desert heat of Dimona to the cool corridors of the White House.
Among the data the Washington
The threat increased Rafi Eitan’s feeling he may have found a way into the U.S. nuclear industry. Numec appeared to be a company not only with poor security, but also lax bookkeeping and a management that left a great deal to be desired by America’s nuclear watchdog. Those very deficiencies made the company an attractive target.
The son of an Orthodox rabbi, Salman Shapiro’s brilliance had already carried him far. At Johns Hopkins University he had obtained his doctorate in chemistry by the age of twenty-eight. His capacity for hard work had seen him become an important member of the nuclear research and development laboratory at Westinghouse; the corporation was contracted to the United States Navy to develop submarine reactors. Checks on Shapiro’s personal background revealed some of his relatives had been Holocaust victims and Shapiro, in “his typical discreet way,” had provided several million dollars for the Technion Institute in Haifa that offered tuition in science and engineering.
In 1957 Shapiro had left Westinghouse and set up Numec. It had twenty-five stockholders, all openly sympathetic to Israel. Shapiro found himself head of a small company in an aggressive cutthroat industry. Nevertheless, Numec had won a number of contracts to recover enriched uranium, a process that usually led to the loss of a quantity of uranium during the salvage operation. There was no way of telling how great or when the loss had taken place. The revelation made Rafi Eitan pop his vitamins with even more satisfaction.
He continued to read how the already uneasy relationship between Israel and the United States over the desire of the Jewish state to become a nuclear power increased when Ben-Gurion traveled to Washington in 1960. At a series of meetings with State Department officials, he was bluntly told that for Israel to possess nuclear weapons would affect the balance of power in the Middle East. In February 1961, President John F. Kennedy wrote to Ben-Gurion suggesting that Dimona should be regularly inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
