Hello and thank you for downloading witness from the BBC World Service.

Today we're going back to June 1981 when the Israelis attacked and destroyed an Iraqi nuclear

reactor, Osyrak, in the first preemptive air air strike on a nuclear facility that the world had ever seen.

A few years ago, Witness talked to the Israeli pilot who led that raid.

Today, we talked to two Iraqis who were on the ground, both nuclear scientists who would be closely involved in the secret mission to acquire nuclear weapons that followed and they say was triggered by the Israeli's action.

It's the 7th of June 1981, Baghdad, and out of the early evening sky,

14 Israeli fighter jets appear as if from nowhere.

There's no warning, no anti-aircraft defences scrambled,

as the plane streaks south towards Iraq's new French-built nuclear reactor. Nuclear scientist

Imad Cadoury had been working in the library that day, translating an American book

on nuclear weapons into Arabic.

On that Sunday, about 630, we heard this huge explosion.

At the time the Iraqi-Iran war was on and we are used to these explosions and what we do is we run up on the

roof of the house to see where the smoke is. I looked all around Baghdad

could see no smoke.

So then I looked southeast and there was a big cloud.

And I said, my lord, that's our site.

That's a nuclear research site.

So I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I can, this 20 kilometers,

tried to get into the site, but the security was in the army.

They said we found cluster bombs, and it's not safe, go back and I arrived there everything was quiet but

people were scattered there looking for what has happened and it was littered with

...