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The story behind Israel’s atomic explosion plan

For many years, Israel tried to prevent Brig. Gen. Yitzhak Yaakov from revealing the story of the 1967 plans to detonate an explosive device in the Sinai Peninsula.
A convoy of Israeli armoured military vehicles rolls through the Sinai peninsula during the 1967 Middle East War, widely known as the Six Day War, in this picture released on June 4, 2007 by Israel's Defence Ministry. Forty years ago this week, Israel swept to victory in six days in a war with Egypt, Syria and Jordan, capturing the Sinai peninsula, Golan Heights, Gaza Strip and West Bank, including Arab East Jerusalem. REUTERS/Israeli Defence Ministry/Handout BLACK AND WHITE ONLY.  EDITORIAL USE ONLY. NOT F
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In discussing Israel's nuclear capabilities, even foreign publications have not gone back to 1967, to the war that transformed Israel from a state under siege and faced with annihilation into a regional empire. The international community now believes that Israel has 90-200 nuclear warheads. According to foreign researchers, some are installed on Jericho missiles, while others can be delivered by fighter jet. A few may even be carried by German-manufactured submarines. Nevertheless, no one had imagined that the story of Israel's atomic arsenal began as early as it did. Israel's nuclear option, once called the Samson option, was not even thought to have existed on the eve of the war that broke out in June 1967. As it turns out, however, it did, at least according to The New York Times.

In the early 2000s, Israel invested significant energy and no small amount of money in an effort to collect and destroy the drafts and manuscripts of personal diary entries and an ostensibly fictional memoir by Brig. Gen. (Res.) Yitzhak “Yatza” Yaakov that he had sent to several friends, publishers and members of the American news media. It now looks like Yaakov's writings included one of the most secretive and explosive stories in the history of Israel's defense establishment.

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