HOW CAN ISRAEL BE SAVED?…4

by Felix Quigley

In this our fourth article in this series on the defence of Israel we go back to September of last year when Israel destroyed a large building in the desert inside Syria. it took time for the reports to emerge. Israel for reasons which are questionable, but may be connected to pressure from the US, which is seeking a deal to be made with the Palestinian Arabs, imposed a black-out. The ties between Syria, Hizbullah, Iran and North Korea are frightening and shows the kind of pressures that people in Israel live under. It is in fact Antisemitism in action.

We take our reports from The Times Online. Url is at the end if you wish to read the many comments made to that large organization.

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Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv and Michael Sheridan in Seoul

ISRAEL’S top-secret air raid on Syria in September destroyed a bomb factory assembling warheads fuelled by North Korean plutonium, a leading Israeli nuclear expert has told The Sunday Times. 

Professor Uzi Even of Tel Aviv University was one of the founders of the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, the source of the Jewish state’s undeclared nuclear arsenal.

“I suspect that it was a plant for processing plutonium, namely, a factory for assembling the bomb,” he said. “I think the DPRK [Democratic People’s Republic of Korea] transferred to Syria weapons-grade plutonium in raw form, that is nuggets of easily transported metal in protective cans. I think the shaping and casting of the plutonium was supposed to be in Syria.”

All governments concerned – even the regime in Damascus – have tried to maintain complete secrecy about the raid.

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The political stakes could hardly be higher. Plutonium is the element which fuelled the American atomic bomb that destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki on August 9, 1945.

Critics in the United States say proof that North Korea supplied such nuclear weapons material to Syria, a state technically at war with Israel, would shatter congressional confidence in the Bush administration’s diplomatic policy.

From beneath the veil of military censorship, western commentators have formed a consensus that the target was a nuclear reactor under construction.

But Even said that purely from scientific observation, he had reached a different conclusion – that it was a nuclear bomb factory, posing a more immediate danger to Israel. He said that satellite photos of the site, taken before the Israeli strike on September 6, showed no sign of the cooling towers and chimneys characteristic of nuclear reactors.

Syria’s haste after the attack to bury the site under tons of soil suggested that hundreds of square yards were contaminated and there were fears of radiation, the professor added.

Since then the Syrians have sealed up the location, levelled the site and diverted curious journalists to a place that had not been attacked by Israel.

The professor’s theory fits with authoritative technical evidence about North Korea’s nuclear weapons programme. The North Koreans are able to produce weapons-grade plutonium, which is electro-refined, alloyed and cast into shapes ready to be machined to fit into a warhead, according to a team of distinguished American nuclear weapons scientists who visited the country’s laboratories.

One of those scientists, Siegfried Hecker, was allowed to hold a sample and was told that it was “good bomb grade plutonium”, because it had a very low content of plutonium240, the isotope which reduces the overall quality of the material.

Assembly of a Nagasaki-type bomb involves mating a plutonium core with a uranium wrap and inserting a small quantity of polonium and beryllium to initiate the chain reaction.

“Plutonium is highly dangerous material,” explained the Israeli professor. “It is easily oxidised in air unless protective measures are taken. The oxide is easily dispersed as dust in air when machining plutonium to create the ‘pit’ [a hollow sphere in many nuclear weapons] and thus can be inhaled, causing a fatality in minute quantities.

“Plutonium pellets are handled and machined exclusively in a large array of ‘glove boxes’, to protect the technicians and their environment. That is why you need a relatively large containment building and cannot assemble a nuclear weapon in your garage – unless you are suicidal of course.”

The debris from a destructive raid on a weapons-building facility could therefore contain toxic radioactive waste. But the main danger for Syria would be the telltale exposure of the elements to surveillance and detection by America. This would explain the cover-up at the site.

North Korea, for its part, has more than enough plutonium to sell some of its stock to Syria.

The same team of visiting US scientists estimated that by late 2006 the nation had made 40-50kg (88-100lb) of the material. Between six and eight kilograms are needed for a weapon.

For the US and its allies the Syrian connection raises the deeply worrying possibility that North Korea has succeeded in building what the US scientists called “a sophisticated design with smaller dimensions and mass so as to fit onto a . . . medium-range missile”.

That puzzle was complicated when North Korea announced that it had tested its first nuclear bomb on October 9 last year. The yield of the blast was small – less than a 20th of the Nagasaki bomb – suggesting to some scientists that the device was sophisticated and small while others believed the North Koreans had simply not made a very good bomb.

Professor Even believes the North Koreans have not yet perfected small warheads. “The mechanical dimensioning at this stage is extremely demanding (less than 0.01mm). So is the casting of the explosives around the plutonium core and the initiation of the implosion,” he said.

The question is under urgent study by nations who might one day be targets of a North Korean device sold to Syria or Iran. Iran is known to have financed missile and weapons deals between North Korea and Syria, causing concern to Israel and the US. One day after the Israeli attack, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, sent his nephew with a personal letter to Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian leader.

The professor’s theory of a clear and present danger that Damascus would get the bomb may be the only credible explanation why Israel carried out a military strike against Syria and risked an all-out conflict.

Indeed on September 6 Israel was ready for war with Syria. Israeli sources said its military chiefs assumed Syria would launch a retaliatory attack, but no reprisal came.

Meanwhile, President Bush has authorised his chief negotiator, Christopher Hill, to go on talking to North Korea in the search for a peaceful solution. Hill will visit Pyongyang this week to pursue negotiations after international technicians got to work on disabling the reactor at Yongbyon, the source of North Korea’s plutonium.

The North Korean dictator Kim Jong-il is supposed to make a full declaration of his nuclear programmes by December 31. The US says that must include information on his weapons deals with Syria and Iran.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2983719.ece

A useful comment was made on this:

Jeffrey

Jeff W. Eerkens, Woodland, USA

The Liberal Media news outlet controllers are so caught up in slamming the current administration and its policies that it has become deaf, dumb, blind and numb to the real threats that exist today. Thanks to the bold clarity of the Israeli military answer, another proxy terrorist location of Iran has been shut down. The problem is that there are certainly other such locations out there.

This raises the issue of the role of regimes which are Stalinist, as you have in North Korea, which are prepared to work alongside Fascists, as in Syria, or Iran. The same mentality exists in Russia and in China also to some extent. This is the counter revolutionary role of Stalinism which follows on in the same path as the alliance which Stalin made with Nazi Germany, sometimes called the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a deal between the Stalinists and the Nazis, made in the summer of 1939.

If this report is correct then you can see the intense danger that Stalinism, as it exists in these forms even today, places the Jews of Israel in, a danger which is also created by the modern Fake “Left’s” hatred for Israel.

There is a great tendency for people who really hate the US Imperialists for what they have done, especially for their support for Fascists and for Islamists in destroying Yugoslavia, and for the lies which they have told about the war against Saddam and Iraq, to lift their eyes from off countries like North Korea. But that would be terribly wrong and completely against the spirit of Trotskyism, which aims to see the overall picture, and to tell it as it is. I have been reading recently how Chomsky provided a cover (he defended) the reactionary Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, on the basis really that Chomsky opposes the US, so anything against the US Chomsky feels bound to support. In fact Chomsky provides a cover for Stalinism. Pol Pot was a Stalinist essentially.

Another report on this issue from the same news source is worth looking at:

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The triangular relationship between North Korea, Syria and Iran continues to perplex intelligence analysts. Syria served as a conduit for the transport to Iran of an estimated £50m of missile components and technology sent by sea from North Korea. The same route may be in use for nuclear equipment.

But North Korea is at a sensitive stage of negotiations to end its nuclear programme in exchange for security guarantees and aid, leading some diplomats to cast doubt on the likelihood that Kim would cross America’s “red line” forbidding the proliferation of nuclear materials.

Christopher Hill, the State Department official representing America in the talks, said on Friday he could not confirm “intelligence-type things”, but the reports underscored the need “to make sure the North Koreans get out of the nuclear business”.

By its actions, Israel showed it is not interested in waiting for diplomacy to work where nuclear weapons are at stake.

As a bonus, the Israelis proved they could penetrate the Syrian air defence system, which is stronger than the one protecting Iranian nuclear sites.

This weekend President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran sent Ali Akbar Mehrabian, his nephew, to Syria to assess the damage. The new “axis of evil” may have lost one of its spokes

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article2461421.ece

We on 4international stand on the side of Israel and for the defence of Israel on each and every occasion and issue.

It is only because Israel has managed since it was born to develop a strong defence and a strong intelligence in Mossad that this horrific threat to its existence was stopped.

How to defend Israel is the most vital question which we face.