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Thirty Years to the Israeli Attack on the Osiraq Nuclear Reactor in Iraq

Yoav J. Tenembaum - 6/1/2011

This 7th of June thirty years ago the Israeli Air Force conducted a surprise attack on Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor. The reactor was completely destroyed. The Israeli pilots returned home safe. It was to be a military operation with long-lasting consequences for the entire region.

Few military attacks in the twentieth century have been so daring and so successful, militarily, and so much criticized diplomatically.

Had Israel not destroyed the Osiraq nuclear reactor, probably the crisis over the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in August 1990 would have looked much different than what it actually did.

It would not be too far fetched to assume that had Saddam Hussein possessed nuclear weapons neither the first nor the second Gulf War would have taken place. Attacking a nuclear Iraq would have seemed an insurmountable challenge, considering the nature of its provocative and unstable leadership.

After all, which totalitarian country possessing nuclear weapons has ever been attacked by the United States and its allies?

Saddam Hussein would not have needed to resort to an explicit threat of a nuclear attack to deter the United States and its allies. The mere knowledge, or even assumption, that Iraq possessed nuclear weapons would have been enough to determine the limits of US policy towards it. The same applies, doubly so, to countries in the region.

Thus, Israel's attack on the Osiraq nuclear reactor had a long-lasting and far-reaching consequence, which went beyond the realm of Israeli-Iraqi enmity.

The decision by the Israeli government to carry out the attack was taken after seven years of overt and covert efforts which failed to convince Saddam Hussein to abandon his nuclear project.

The French government, which had facilitated the nuclear reactor to Iraq, did not believe that the plant would be used to produce nuclear weapons. It was thus unwilling to stop the project. Diplomatic efforts, therefore, had led nowhere.

This was a point of contention between the then prime minister of Israel, Likud leader Menahem Begin, and the leader of the Labour opposition, Shimon Peres, who believed that further diplomatic efforts with France might have produced the same result that was ultimately achieved by the military attack.

What is interesting to point out is that, even during the first Gulf War, Peres still insisted that he was right in advocating the diplomatic route. It should be stressed that Peres believed that the newly elected president of France, the Socialist Francois Mitterand, would have been more amenable to Israeli arguments.

Certainly, Mitterand was known for being more positively disposed towards Israel than his predecessors had been. However, there is no evidence indicating that he would have been willing to act any differently.

More important, time was running out. The reactor was expected to be active within a few months, at most. A military attack on an active nuclear reactor might have produced a nuclear fall-out. Begin said later he would never have permitted an attack on an active nuclear reactor considering the horrendous consequences that might have ensued.

Although convinced that a military attack was necessary, Begin conducted an open decision-making process which allowed those within Israel's political and defence establishments who were opposed to it to express their opinions freely.

Begin had to face the dilemma of a statesman that has to make a life-threatening decision entailing the possibility of failure and the certainty of world-wide criticism, whatever the outcome of his decision. Begin had an alternative. He decided to eschew it.

Only the inner-conviction of Begin about the moral imperative and pragmatic necessity of the proposed military operation could have helped him overcome that dilemma.

Begin took two major, strategic decisions during his first tenure as prime minister: to sign a peace agreement with Egypt, notwithstanding the far reaching compromises that this entailed, and to conduct a military operation aimed at destroying Iraq's nuclear reactor.

These two decisions had long-lasting consequences not only for Israel but for the entire region.

What these two decisions had in common was the strategic vision behind them: the peace accord with the most powerful Arab nation was aimed at altering the previously-existing military and diplomatic equation in the Middle East; the attack on the nuclear reactor in Iraq was intended to prevent a dramatic reversal of that equation.