Shimon Peres: The architect of Israel's nuclear program

 

 

Perhaps his greatest achievement was the ability to make Israel's enemies believe that Israel had the ultimate strategic deterrence and a nuclear monopoly in the Middle East.

(Israel and the world bid farewell to Shimon Peres)

Shimon Peres marked his greatest achievement in a long, and impressive life, full of ups and downs, at the age of 33. If he was a copywriter, he could have summed it up proudly in one spot-on sentence, paraphrased from Herzl: In Sèvres, I established Dimona and ensured the future of the State of Israel.

Dimona, beginning in the late 1950s and into the 1960s, saw the building of the "textile factory" - the nuclear reactor in which, according to foreign reports, Israel produces fissile materials - uranium and plutonium - for its arsenal of nuclear weapons. According to these reports, these weapons were, and remain, the central factor deterring Arab states and Iran from fulfilling their fantasies of eliminating Israel on the battlefield.

http://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Shimon-Peres-The-architect-of-Israels-nuclear-program-468893