Construction intensifies at Israel’s suspected nuclear site
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates—Construction work has intensified on a major new structure at a facility key to Israel’s long-suspected atomic weapons program, according to satellite images analyzed by experts. They say it could be a new reactor or a facility to assemble nuclear arms—but secrecy shrouding the program makes it difficult to know for sure.
The work at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center near the city of Dimona will renew questions about Israel’s widely believed status as the Mideast’s only nuclear-armed state.
It could also draw international criticism, especially since it comes after Israel and the United States bombed nuclear sites across Iran in June over their fears that the Islamic Republic could use its enrichment facilities to pursue an atomic weapon. Among the sites attacked was Iran’s heavy water reactor at Arak.
New water reactor
Seven experts who examined the images all said they believed the construction was related to Israel’s long-suspected nuclear weapons program, given its proximity to the reactor at Dimona, where no civilian power plant exists. However, they split on what the new construction could be.
Three said the location and size of the area under construction and the fact that it appeared to have multiple floors meant the most likely explanation for the work was the construction of a new heavy water reactor. Such reactors can produce plutonium and another material key to nuclear weapons.
The other four acknowledged it could be a heavy water reactor but also suggested the work could be related to a new facility for assembling nuclear weapons. They declined to be definitive given the construction was still in an early stage.
“It’s probably a reactor—that judgment is circumstantial but that’s the nature of these things,” said Jeffrey Lewis, an expert at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, who based his assessment on the images and Dimona’s history. “It’s very hard to imagine it is anything else.”
The Associated Press (AP) first reported on excavations at the facility, some 90 kilometers south of Jerusalem, in 2021.
