Mordechai Vanunu, also known as John Crossman, is an Israeli former nuclear technician and peace activist who, citing his opposition to weapons of mass destruction, revealed details of Israel's nuclear weapons program to the British press in 1986. He was subsequently lured to Italy by the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, where he was drugged and abducted. He was secretly transported to Israel and ultimately convicted in a trial that was held behind closed doors.
Vanunu in 2009
An aerial view of the Negev Nuclear Research Center in 1968
Frank Barnaby (pictured in 1982) helped verify Vanunu's story, and later testified for him as a defense witness
Meeting with Vanunu, Ali Kazak, and Bishop Riah Abu Assal in Jerusalem 2005
Nuclear weapons and Israel
The State of Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons. Estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads, and the country is believed to possess the ability to deliver them in several methods, including by aircraft, as submarine-launched cruise missiles, and via the Jericho series of intermediate to intercontinental range ballistic missiles. Its first deliverable nuclear weapon is thought to have been completed in late 1966 or early 1967; which would make it the sixth country in the world to have developed them.
Kennedy and Ben-Gurion in 1961.
Completed Dimona complex as seen by US Corona satellite on November 11, 1968
Mordechai Vanunu's photograph of a Negev Nuclear Research Center glove box containing nuclear materials in a model bomb assembly, one of about 60 photographs he later gave to the British press
