[392cobra]

A Digest of DEBKAfile Round-the-Clock Exclusives in Week Ending Oct. 25,
2007

Vol. 7, Issue 323, October 26, 2007

The Lethality of Plutonium
The Israeli Attack Pre-Empted Syria’s Production of the Ultimate Dirty
Weapon


The Syrian installation depicted by US media on Oct. 24 as the one
destroyed by Israel on Sept. 6 was a partially completed Producing
Reactor. This facility is too primitive to make a nuclear bomb, but it can
produce fissile or highly radio-active materials, usually plutonium, in
their most unstable, dangerous form.

Combined with explosives, these materials become a “dirty bomb” or RDD.
Even on its own, plutonium is an especially lethal tool of mass death.
DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s nuclear experts affirm that there is no technical
remedy able to provide complete safety from radiological attack in
existence today.

Our experts further note: The Syrian Producing Reactor (illustrated here)
lacks the dome, which usually houses an advanced reactor’s core and
coolant (or moderator). It is also short of the apparatus required to take
the nuclear process to the far more advanced level of separation and
uranium enrichment. It is primitive, easily operated and cheap (tens of
millions of dollars), compared with the far more elaborate, costly and
high tech full-scale program for making a military weapon.

The installation’s function would have been limited to the production of
the highly radioactive, highly unstable PU239 (plutonium), or nuclear
waste.

(DEBKA-Net-Weekly 320 of Oct. 6 first reported that the Syrian
installation was designed to produce a form of “dirty bomb”)

This product is in no way similar to a nuclear bomb - or even a bomb at
all. It is made by bombarding natural uranium – U238 - with neutrons which
split each atom, releasing more neutrons which continue the process (chain
reaction) and must be slowed by a “moderator” (possibly water or heavy
water) to prevent an explosion.



The ultimate contaminant



Combined with dynamite, it can be used as “the poor man’s” nuclear bomb, a
lethally radioactive device, which is suitable for the use of a suicide
bomber, who will be irradiated by its use together with his victims.

Unlike uranium, plutonium does not in exist in nature; it is entirely
manmade and the deadliest of contaminators. It is not susceptible to any
known preventive or protective measures.

PU239 can be carried as a powder or solid substance in a suitcase or
packed in a missile warhead and simply scattered. In this form, even
without being combined with explosives, plutonium contaminates everything
it touches; an easily portable amount poisons an area of several square
kilometers, causing death, acute radiation poisoning, lingering illness
and genetic changes. It poisons water and soil. Deposited in Israel ’s
scarce water sources which rise in Syria , it would poison a whole nation.

According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s nuclear experts, unlike natural
substances, whose radioactivity weakness in days, PU239 retains its
radioactive life for thousands of years. Cleanup may not be technically
feasible. Any city subjected to a plutonium attack would become a
permanently uninhabitable wasteland.

In this sense, even before Iran reaches its goal of a nuclear bomb, its
president’s wish “to wipe Israel off the map” could have been fulfilled by
Syria ’s plutonium reactor and its product – whether delivered by Syria ,
Hizballah, Hamas or the Islamic Republic itself.

Israel therefore went into action to destroy the Syrian Producer Reactor
before it went into production.

US government agencies tend to play down the menace of radiological attack
as a “weapon of mass disruption” rather than a “weapon of mass
destruction,” to prevent panic, because no one is equipped today to deal
with a radiological scenario of this kind.

The next article sheds new light on the form taken by Israel ’s raid of
Syria ’s nuclear reactor.



An Enigma Turns a New Page
Israeli Commandos Carry off Syria’s Reactor Equipment – or the Israeli Air
Raid that Never Was

Yet another version of what the Israel air attack over Syria on Sept. 6
was all about made the rounds this week of a select group of military,
intelligence and political figures visiting Washington from the Middle
East . This version was relayed to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s sources in the
American capital. It put a fresh slant on the puzzling episode compared
with the various accounts postulated in US media in the absence of
authoritative information from official sources.

According to this version, the Israeli attack was a major operation in
size and did not entail an air strike.

A large number of special forces’ troops were dropped by helicopter over
the Syrian-North Korean site near the Syrian Desert village of Al-Tibna,
800 meters east of the Euphrates .

After disposing of the Syrian guards in a brief shootout, the Israeli
attackers corralled the personnel inside the compound of an unfinished
nuclear reactor, most of them Syrian military men and a small group of
North Korean nuclear and missile technicians, in a side room and kept them
under heavy guard.

The invaders now had several hours at their disposal for their main mission.

It began with the arrival of large Israeli Yasur transport helicopters
which disgorged teams of intelligence investigators and technicians. While
the first team interrogated the Syrian and North Korean captives, the
technical teams disassembled the North Korean nuclear apparatus. All its
components were loaded, together with the missiles and matching warheads
stored at the compound, onto the helicopter transports which lost no time
in taking off in an easterly direction.



Leaked to lobby Bush into getting rid of Assad



The Washington visitors who talked to DEBKA-Net-Weekly said they did not
know from which direction the aircraft entered Syrian airspace or where
they refueled for the return flight – possibly at US facilities in Iraq ?
Neither were they told what happened to the Syrian and North Korean
personnel: Were they set free after the episode, killed or taken captive
to Israel?

All they know for sure is that the equipment for Syria’s North Korean
nuclear reactor was snatched - lock, stock and barrel - and flown to
Israel.

The same Middle East visitors also reported that an air umbrella spread
out over the eastern Mediterranean from Cyprus up to the Syrian and Iraqi
borders shielded the Israeli ground and air forces for the duration of
their operation. Since the Israeli Air Force could not have stretched to
an area of this size, they assumed that the US Air Force was responsible.

As soon as the reactor components were removed, Israeli forces blew up the
structures housing them – surface and underground - and were themselves
lifted out by the first fleet of helicopters, which brought them to their
Syrian Desert destination and waited to fly them out.

Bush administration officials – presumably from the Pentagon, the National
Security Council and the CIA - had a reason for spilling this highly
sensitive information to those visitors. According to DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s
Washington sources, they were looking for help in swaying President George
W. Bush to change his attitude towards Syrian President Bashar Assad, by
the following argument.

With irrefutable proof in hand, procured by Israeli commandos and verified
by US intelligence, of Assad’s nefarious activities, the White House
cannot avoid the conclusion that the Syrian ruler must go. What is the
administration waiting for?