Osirak

Juan Cole writes:
People going ballistic over the Bushehr reactor are perhaps remembering the 1981 Israeli attack on the French-made OSIRAK reactor in Baghdad. But that was a piece of counter-productive theater anyway. The French had insisted on constructing a light water reactor, and on putting in safeguards against its being used for weapons construction. The Israeli attack therefore did not forestall a weapons program; the reactor would have been almost impossible to use for that purpose. After the Israeli attack, though, Saddam Hussein launched a crash program to enrich uranium through magnetatrons, an effort that appears to have failed or to have been a very long-term proposition. It was the Israeli strike that convinced the Baath regime to carry out a crash program of nuclear weapons advances that only Baghdad’s defeat in the Gulf War revealed. The Israelis would have been better off leaving the innocuous OSIRAK alone; as it was they provoked an Iraqi crash nuclear weapons program that might have ultimately borne fruit had it not been for Saddam’s rash and brutal invasion of Kuwait.