No Longer a Secret: How Israel Destroyed Syria's Nuclear Reactor

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-no-longer-a-secret-how-israel-destroyed-syria-s-nuclear-reactor-1.5914407

by myth_drannon • 8 years ago

91 40 8 years ago

haaretz.com

brianbreslin2• 8 years ago

Is there any way to find this article not behind a paywall?

mrcarrot• 8 years ago

Googling the title from an incognito mode browser session appears to work.

myth_drannon• 8 years ago

You can read a short article about it on Time.com, but it's a short article not an investigation like Haaretz had done. http://time.com/5208531/israeli-airstrike-syrian-nuclear-sit...

JorgeGT• 8 years ago

For me the Google cache loaded the full article: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:WXaVey...

ajr0• 8 years ago

click the 'web' link under the link that has enabled my ability to view.

kencausey• 8 years ago

Here it is on archive.is: https://archive.is/https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.prem...

Scramblejams• 8 years ago

https://archive.is/UY1Lv has the virtue of working with Instapaper, if you need that.

phyller• 8 years ago

For those down-voting this question, keep in mind the FAQs mention that stories can be posted from paywall sites that have work arounds:

Are paywalls ok?

"It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

brianbreslin2• 8 years ago

This brings up the challenge that it is hard to ask a person to pay for a subscription to a site to read one article. I know a million startups have tried to tackle this, but none have done it right yet.

shaqbert2• 8 years ago

In context, here is a great video from the Belfer center on nuclear bomb making and what are the hard parts [0]. Getting the fission material is the hard part, and in order to get plutonium nukes you need a enrichment plant, i.e. a reactor that is not meant to produce energy but breed plutonium.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVhQOhxb1Mc (at min 47, he starts talking about the hard parts)

stcredzero• 8 years ago

i.e. a reactor that is not meant to produce energy but breed plutonium.

The French demonstrate that it is perfectly practical to run reactors to both produce energy and breed plutonium.

shaqbert2• 8 years ago

Well yes in terms of Plutonium in general, but not the weapon grade P239 kind of material that is very pure... For those you need a specific reactor dedicated to one cause.

CiPHPerCoder• 8 years ago

The CSS popups on this page are annoying.

justicezyx2• 8 years ago

So in some other context, such activities are labeled "terrorism", now this becomes more neutral.

This title is actually fine.

But the other ones need to be more objective.

burkaman3• 8 years ago

If a government directly does it, it's not called terrorism. I don't think I've ever seen a headline that contradicts that.

dragonwriter3• 8 years ago

If a government directly does it, it's not called terrorism.

Considering that the modern use of “terrorist” and “terrorism” traced back directly to description of actors and actions associated with the Terror in Revolutionary France, that would be erroneous. It's true that much of the modern focus is on international terrorism (which necessarily excludes internal state terrorism, which is a form of intranational terrorism), state terrorism remains a significant thing (both internationally and internally.)

justicezyx2• 8 years ago

Wow. I just wanted the news outlets to be more objective.

That is just some minor human bias which can be corrected. Let's not go into the unendable argument of accurate human language meaning.

smsm423• 8 years ago

Terrorism is untargeted violence against civil population, with the aim to instill fear and influence policy. Destruction of a military or military-related object by a warring country is not terrorism, it is an act of war. In war, objects that can have military significance - bridges, roads, factories, warehouses, etc. - are routinely attacked. This has nothing to do with terrorism. Note that Israel and Syria is in the state of war since 1948, when Syria was one of the states that tried to destroy the nascent Jewish state. Unlike some other Arab countries, Syria never made peace with Israel and never really wanted to.

theptip2• 8 years ago

Terrorism is untargeted violence against civil population

That definition might have been true immediately after 2001-09-11, but now the term has been diluted and coopted to cover any anti-government military action. Arguably this is just double-speak; I consider this term to be borderline meaningless at this point.

See for example Russia/Georgia [1], or more recently the "terrorists" opposing the Syrian government [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Russo-Georgian_diplomatic... [2]: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/joe-lauria/who-is-a-terrorist...

lr4444lr• 8 years ago

Terrorism is untargeted violence against civil population, with the aim to instill fear and influence policy

... by non-state actors. When a recognized government does it, it's generally called a war crime.

lambersley• 8 years ago

The root word is 'terror'. If terror (mass fear, intimidation, panic) was the intent, I would agree.

octorian• 8 years ago

I remember when this event was an active news story. At the time, it seemed like you'd learn something new every time you refreshed the page, and get a different ambiguous take on events depending on which news source you were reading,

The only thing that was clear to me (in guarded vague language) was that Israel had bombed something in Syria, and that it might have been nuclear-related.

benja123• 8 years ago

The Ynet article has a really interesting short video documentary in which they interview many of the people involved in the decision making. Also no paywall.

https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5182507,00.html

olivermarks• 8 years ago

One rogue state with undeclared nuclear weapons bombing another rogue state to prevent them building undeclared nuclear weapons...all kept secret for 10 years...Israeli intelligence gathering has amazing penetration and sophistication... https://youtu.be/ca-C3voZwpM

loufe• 8 years ago

It's been public since at most 2012, nevertheless for a country of their size -I agree- their intelligence organizations are incredibly impressive.

thathappened• 8 years ago

Google q anon posts but skip the dot com on mobile.

Seems as though something big related to integrated intelligence and politicians about to happen.

mullen• 8 years ago

The New Yorker has a much better article that came out 6 years ago.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/17/the-silent-str...

pacofvf• 8 years ago

I've read both, Haaretz's it's more in depth, It give us an insight of what happened at Olmert's cabinet and his conversations with Nethanyu.

MichaelMoser123• 8 years ago

I don't know what to make of it: there seems to be a media campaign going with the aim to make Olmert look good: he is back on the front pages - he got out of jail recently and his memoirs are being published by Yediot Ahronot; Now go figure what is for real and what is part of the media campaign.

Or that they want to block Barak and his recent attempts to get back into politics. Interesting that the article paints Barak as a conspiracy minded crackpot. (Maybe one has to be a conspiracy theorist in order to survive office politics in Israel).

gaius_baltar• 8 years ago

The part that really got me is the one regarding the photos that Israeli agents captured from Othman's laptop in Vienna. This looks like the surface of a deeper story -- why was a top diplomatic agent carrying highly classified information lacking basic training on data security? Or why did his staff let him use an unsecured/unencrypted computer? Assuming he had no use for these pictures in Vienna, why was he carrying them to a place where attacks from foreign agents are expected? Why weren't top diplomatic agents and people trusted with state secrets issued clean (and secured) laptops before traveling abroad?

The way it was described precludes a Evil Maid Attack unless, of course, they had previous access to the same laptop. A lot of very interesting questions remain.

No Longer a Secret: How Israel Destroyed Syria's Nuclear Reactor

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