When Israel destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 12 June 2021

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On 7 June 1981 Israeli fighter jets launched a surprise attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor located outside Baghdad, killing 11 people. The French-built reactor was still under construction and there was no leakage of nuclear material, but the bombing was widely condemned internationally. We hear from Dr Fadhil Muslim al Janabi, a former consultant for Iraq's nuclear agency. Also this week, eye-witness testimony to the fall of Madrid in 1939; Hamas' unexpected election victoryin 2006, the plight of legal sex workers in Tunisia and taking part in Benjamin Britten's War Requiem at the consecration of Coventry's new cathedral.

Photo: The Tammuz light-water nuclear materials testing reactor under construction in Al-Tuwaitha, just outside of Baghdad, 1979. (Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson, the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:07.0	This week a pivotal moment in the Israeli-Palestinian Confrontation, 2006 in the election of Hamas as the dominant force in Gaza.
0:15.0	It was like pretty exciting to have a feeling that, you know, like I'm voting now for the first time.
0:21.0	Plus eyewitnesses to the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, the recent history of legal
0:26.4	sex work in Tunisia, and the first performance of Benjamin Britain's War Requiem in 1962.
0:33.0	No applause by request of the composer.
0:38.0	It was not an audience.
0:41.0	That's all to come, but we're going to begin in a region of the world which has remained something of a tinderbox for more than 40 years.
0:48.0	And Mike Langeron is here to bring us the story of an event which under slightly different circumstances might have ignited that
0:54.4	tinderbox and this Mike centers on the Iraq of Saddam Hussein in the early 1980s.
1:00.5	Yes this is the story of how the Israelis sought to head off what they saw as the potential nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein, France and Italy had struck deals with Iraq back in the 1970s to build a series of nuclear plants for peaceful
1:15.0	purposes that they say and one of them was the Osirac nuclear reactor that's
1:19.6	just outside Baghdad in a highly controversial move the Israeli government of the time
1:24.4	decided to strike against that reactor in June of 1981 and the attack was carried out in
1:30.4	such secrecy that news of it didn't actually hit the world headlines
1:34.5	until the following day.
1:35.9	The Israelis said today that their jets attacked and completely destroyed Iraq's
1:41.5	nuclear reactor on Sunday.
1:43.3	Iraq has called for an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council
1:47.0	and an urgent meeting of the Arab League is to be held.
1:49.3	The Americans say they were not consulted in advance and they've joined the condemnation of the raid.
1:54.7	I didn't hear the attack. I was too far away. There weren't any phones and it wasn't announced on TV.
	...

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