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Old 04-20-2006, 08:02 PM   #1 (permalink)
intangible child
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Bush Make No Mistake Israel Can Fight It”s Own Battle!
New photographs of Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor published last month by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have confirmed that Israel has the capacity to have produced 100-200 nuclear warheads.
Dimona reactor
The Dimona reactor

The high-resolution photos, taken in July by the Space Imaging Corporation's IKONOS satellite on behalf of the FAS, provide important clues as to the amount of plutonium and enriched uranium the reactor can produce, which in turn can be used to estimate the possible size of Israel's nuclear arsenal.

A comparison of the IKONOS photos with declassified American satellite photos from the 1960's indicates that there have been no additional cooling towers built at Dimona since 1971. According to FAS, this means that that the power capacity of the reactor has probably not increased significantly during this period. This contradicts previous reports, based on information leaked to the press by former Dimona technician Mordechai Vanunu in 1986, that the power level had increased to well over 150 megawatts.

The satellite imagery also indicates that Israel has probably not undertaken large-scale production of enriched uranium at Dimona. Although previous reports have alleged that the Israelis began projects to enrich uranium using gas centrifuge and laser separation techniques in the 1980's, the IKONOS photos reveal that newly-constructed facilities at the site are not large enough for industrial-scale uranium enrichment. According to FAS, "existing pilot-scale facilities [for uranium enrichment] would not appear to have the potential to substantially increase the total size of the Israeli nuclear weapons stockpile."

"Based on plausible upper and lower bounds of the operating practices at the reactor, Israel could have produced enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons," said the FAS report. Previous estimates had ranged as high as 400.
http://www.meib.org/articles/0009_me3.htm

http://www.ucsusa.org/global_securit...animation.html

http://www.greenpeace.org/internatio...ation-starts-a

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"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it." ~ General Douglas Macarthur, 1957

Last edited by intangible child; 04-21-2006 at 02:09 AM.
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