FOIAWEAR — DIMONA / The Reactor the Estimate Predicted Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 067

DIMONA — on 5 January 1962 the Office of the Deputy Director (Intelligence) sent a memorandum to the Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs on the Israeli nuclear programme. It is a short paper, and one paragraph in it is the whole story.

The memorandum first disposes of the reactor everyone could see, the one the United States had supplied: Israel had received “a 1 megawatt swimming pool reactor, which is safeguarded by U.S. procedures and cannot contribute to a nuclear weapon program except as a basic research facility.” Then, in the next numbered paragraph, the other one: “A nuclear reactor complex is under construction near Dimona in the Negev.”

The paper is precise about how long it had been going on — “Ground breaking at the Dimona site took place in late 1959” — and then does the thing that makes it worth printing sixty years later. It works out the schedule and commits to it: “All told, it appears that the Dimona reactor could go critical in late 1962 or early 1963, and reach full power operation by mid 1963 to early 1964.”

It also notes the physics in passing: at a power level of 26 megawatts, the reactor could produce plutonium. The estimate is dated, released in November 2001, and reads exactly like what it is — an intelligence service doing arithmetic on a secret construction site it could not visit, and getting the year right.

The artwork is the site as it must have looked: a reactor rising out of the Negev at dusk, a gantry crane over it, floodlights just come on, a truck on the dirt track. No faces are depicted.

The QR code on the front opens the source: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/document/0000679731 — the released CIA memorandum “Israeli Nuclear Energy Program,” 5 January 1962. Every quotation above is from it.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717, 6.1 oz garment-dyed cotton, S–4XL. Front print only; plain back. Artwork approximately 6.9 × 4.6 in, QR approximately 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Colours: offered in both dark and light garment colours — the site at dusk in amber, bone, slate-violet and oxblood on Black, Graphite, Espresso, Navy and Pepper, and the same scene struck as a dark ink plate on White, Ivory, Butter, Chalky Mint, Blossom, Light Green and Chambray.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, tumble dry low. Do not iron the print directly.

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