Free Raid on the Sun by Rodger W. Claire

happily have eaten old tires from the Tigris if it would have bought them hundreds of millions of dollars in cheap oil.
    Hussein’s trip was the reciprocal visit to seal the deal struck in Baghdad. Hamza and his colleagues had picked out the perfect reactor for the Nuclear Research Center: the Osiris reactor, a huge, aluminum-domed, top-of-the-line research reactor, named for the Egyptian god of the underworld. France would oversee the production, shipping, and construction of the reactor and train Iraqi technicians in its operation. Ironically, as it turned out, many of the French companies contracted to do the work were the exact same government-approved outfits that had secretly built Israel’s Dimona reactor a decade earlier. France also expanded the original nuclear trade treaty to include yet another, smaller research reactor, “Isis,” named after Osiris’s wife, which would be erected alongside Osiris. Finally, in a rare and controversial decision, France agreed to supply Iraq with seventy-two kilograms of highly regulated enriched, or “weapons-grade,” uranium for start-up fuel. This last agreement quickly caught the attention of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which kept a keen watch on any movement of U235 because it could be readily converted to use in an atomic bomb.
    The reactor “listed” for $150 million. The price tag for Saddam was
$300
million.
    “We were happy to pay,” Hamza would recall later. “After all, who else was going to sell us a nuclear reactor?”
    Euphoric, Hussein rechristened the nuclear reactor
Osiraq
(incorporating the name
Iraq
), or “Osirak” in English, and the Nuclear Research Center “Tammuz,” after the Arabic word for
July,
in honor of the month of the Ba’th revolution. Tammuz would form the centerpiece of Iraq’s new nuclear energy industry centered at al-Tuwaitha, “the truncheon,” in the brown flatlands of the Tigris.
             
    The two Israeli generals, David Ivry and Raful Eitan, stared in silence at the row of grainy eight-by-tens, dealt like a poker hand on the table before them—aces and eights, a dead man’s hand. Smuggled out of Iraq at great personal risk by Mossad agents, the photographs showed a veritable Nuclear Oz populated by steel-and-glass laboratories, a nuclear fuel reprocessing unit, modern administration buildings, a square mile of electrified fences, and, rising Venuslike in the center of it all, the huge, gleaming aluminum dome of the Osirak nuclear reactor.
    Taken from ground level at al-Tuwaitha, the blowups were incontrovertible proof that Saddam Hussein’s blueprint for an ambitious, modern nuclear program was proceeding at an alarming pace. Israel had known about the center, of course: Mossad had alerted Yitzhak Rabin to the possibility back at the time French prime minister Jacques Chirac first visited Baghdad in 1974 to discuss the trade treaty between France and Iraq. At the time, Israeli prime minister Rabin had called for Jewish-American organizations to pressure the Ford administration to help kill the deal. Defense Minister Shimon Peres had personally appealed to his close friend Chirac to cancel the contract. But the French could not bring themselves to abandon such a fat cash cow. Chirac reassured Peres that perhaps he could do “something” later, after the French national elections. In the end, Rabin decided to “wait and see.”
    Now, three years later, in May 1977, it was clear Hussein had much bigger plans than a simple research reactor. Israeli intelligence estimated Osirak would go “hot,” that is, be fueled with radioactive uranium, within three years, four tops. Israeli scientists figured the reactor would produce enough enriched weapons-grade uranium to build two or three Hiroshima-size bombs a year. The contingency people calculated that one “small” atomic bomb dropped on Tel Aviv would kill at least one hundred thousand people.
    Begin had just defeated Israel’s liberal