New satellite photos of Israel's nuclear reactor appear to indicate that little has been done to expand the facility in the last few years, and that some international estimates, according to which Israel may have stockpiled up to 400 nuclear warheads, are wide of the mark.
The photographs, taken last month by the Space Imaging Corporation's Ikonos satellite, and published in Israeli newspapers and on a website maintained by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), show little aboveground expansion at the Israeli reactor in Dimona in the southern Negev, since previous such photographs were taken 30 years ago. This lack of expansion apparently contradicts information provided by Mordechai Vanunu, the former Dimona technician who is most of the way through an 18-year jail term imposed for detailing Israel's nuclear secrets to London's Sunday Times in 1986.
The assumption that Israel had been expanding the facility in recent years led some international experts to conclude that, by now, Israel would have stockpiled up to 400 nuclear warheads for its Jericho missiles and other delivery systems. However, the FAS now says that the new pictures suggest "that no new cooling towers were constructed in the years between 1971 and 2000 . . . and that the reactor's power level has not been increased significantly during this period". As a consequence, the FAS concludes that Israel has by now produced "enough plutonium for at least 100 nuclear weapons, but probably not significantly more than 200 weapons".
Israel has never formally acknowledged having a nuclear capability at all, nor has it opened Dimona for international inspection. However, the details of Dimona are known to all Israelis, and the latest photos have been widely discussed here; most attempts to impose military censorship on such information have collapsed in recent years, overwhelmed by the internet.
In the ongoing quest for peace with the Palestinians, meanwhile, Israel's Acting Foreign Minister, Mr Shomo Ben-Ami, met Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak in Alexandria yesterday, and came away praising Egypt's "interesting" ideas for resolving the disputed status of Jerusalem - cherished by both Israel and the Palestinians as their capital - the main stumbling block to a permanent peace deal.
Mr Ben-Ami has also been holding talks with Palestinian negotiators, one of whom, the Gaza security chief, Mr Mohammad Dahlan, said yesterday that the Palestinians were now likely to postpone plans to declare statehood on September 13th "by a few weeks or a month" to give the talks more time.
Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ehud Barak, apparently trying to press the Palestinians towards a deal, indicated that if there was no breakthrough soon, he would change his government's focus, concentrate on a domestic agenda, and invite the hardline Likud to join his coalition. However, Likud leaders immediately said they had no desire to partner Mr Barak, and were seeking to bring his government down.