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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Operation OPERA: Israeli Attack on Iraq's Osirak 1981 |
| 2023-10-10 |
| [National Security Archive] Washington, D.C., June 7, 2021 — On June 7, 1981, 40 years ago today, Israel attacked and partially destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear research reactor at Tuwaitha, using U.S. supplied F-15 and F-16 aircraft to carry out the attack. Ten Iraqi soldiers and one French engineer were killed during the airstrike. Apparently, the Israeli raid took President Ronald Reagan and his advisers completely by surprise, yet their predecessors, including President Jimmy Carter, were aware of the strong possibility of an attack. As early as July 1980, U.S. Ambassador Sam Lewis warned Secretary of State Edmund Muskie and President Carter in an eyes-only telegram that his meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Begin had led him to conclude that the Israelis might undertake "preemptive strikes with conventional weapons... regardless of the awesome consequences of such action." Later, Lewis suggested that information on this and other discussions with Begin did not reach the Reagan administration, though more needs to be learned about the sources for this gap in "institutional memory." According to Lewis’s messages, the Israelis were particularly worried about French and Italian aid to the Iraqi nuclear program and in a briefing to Begin in December 1980 Lewis assured him that we "are taking widespread concern about the Iran-Iraq war to press Italy and France to reassess their nuclear cooperation with Iraq." Whether the Israelis were told about secret French measures to prevent an Iraqi weapons program is unclear, but Lewis warned Begin that "precipitate action against Iraq’s nuclear installations would be a severe setback to prospects for Middle East peace." Indeed, the attack had a strongly negative impact on Israel’s image in the Arab world and elsewhere. The reactor had been purchased from France under a bilateral agreement that it would be used for peaceful purposes. The research facility was also subject to International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. Israel asserted that Iraq was on the brink of developing a nuclear weapons capability and justified the attack as an act of self-defense. Iraq insisted that its reactor program was peaceful, and France said that the reactor’s design features and the precautionary procedures it had implemented insured that the Osirak reactor could never be used in the production of nuclear weapons. |
| Posted by:Besoeker |
| #1 How long must we wait ? |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2023-10-10 08:27 |