Exclusive: When Israel launched a covert scheme to steal material and secrets to build a nuclear bomb, U.S. officials looked the other way and obstructed investigations, as described in a book reviewed by James DiEugenio.
By James DiEugenio
In 1968, CIA Director Richard Helms was presented with a disturbing National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) stating that Israel had obtained atomic weapons, a dangerous development that occurred earlier than the CIA had anticipated.
It was particularly dangerous because just the year before, the Six Day War had marked the beginning of open hostilities between the Israelis and Arab nation states. To prevail, Israel had launched preemptive air attacks against Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq at the start of the conflict. Considering that violent backdrop, Helms immediately arranged a meeting with President Lyndon Johnson to inform him of this troubling milestone.
CIA Director Richard Helms.
The man who had prepared the NIE and gave it to Helms was the CIA’s chief science and technology officer, Carl Duckett. After Helms met with Johnson, the CIA Director told Duckett about the President’s rather odd reaction. LBJ did not get upset, and he did not order an investigation into how it happened. Further, he did not tell Helms to let both the Defense Department and State Department know about it so they could establish intelligence inquiries or consider sanctions.
Instead, Johnson did the opposite. He told Helms to keep the news secret and specifically told the Director not to let the secretaries of State or Defense know about it.
Helms obeyed the orders of his Commander in Chief, but he decided to talk to the FBI about how this development had occurred earlier than expected. Thus begins Roger Mattson’s Stealing the Atom Bomb: How Denial and Deception Armed Israel, the riveting story of duplicity, betrayal, cover-ups and deceit.
As the book shows, the cover-ups and duplicity did not just come from Israel and its agents in America. The deceit also came from men inside the American government who, for whatever reasons, decided to cast a blind eye on what was really happening under their jurisdiction, even after they had been alerted to it.
What Mattson reveals is no less than an atomic heist – one that could have been prevented if men in high positions had done their duty.
Highly Enriched Uranium
After Johnson told Helms not to tell State or Defense, the CIA Director called Attorney General Ramsey Clark, because what made this news even more ominous — and a potential crime — was what the CIA had discovered when it conducted a chemical test around the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona, in the Negev desert.
U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark with President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. (U.S. Government photo)
Duckett had concluded that Israel had something that they should not have possessed at that time: HEU, or highly enriched uranium, which could only be produced by one of the five major powers that already had nuclear weapons.
But the test had also revealed characteristics that showed the material had originated in the United States. (Mattson, p. 97) Specifically, the HEU came from Portsmouth, Ohio and then was further processed at a plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania.
The importance of this information was that the HEU was processed to such a degree – well over 90 percent U 235 – that it was classified as weapons grade uranium. The technical term for it is the acronym SNM, or Special Nuclear Material, meaning that it is fissile: it can easily be split with neutrons. Although the Portsmouth plant is shut down today, beginning in 1956 it did produce weapons-grade uranium.
It was in Apollo, Pennsylvania, that the trail of the SNM and the crime of its diversion becomes exceedingly suspect. The plant that did the further processing of HEU, and the ultimate shipping, was named Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation, or NUMEC, and there were a number of reasons why suspicion had centered on NUMEC even before Helms called Clark.
First, NUMEC had a rather unreliable record when it came to keeping track of HEU and other materials that had been given to it through the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). The way the system worked is that the particular company would forward its business requests — from either private or governmental agencies — to the AEC. The AEC would then estimate how much nuclear material NUMEC would need to fulfill the contract. If a company was using up more material than the AEC properly estimated, that company would be fined quite a lot of money. If the shortages persisted, the AEC and the FBI could then open up an investigation.
With CIA’s discoveries, the possibility presented itself that a diversion of the nuclear material could be taking place. Either someone from the outside was stealing the material, or someone on the inside was embezzling it.
As Mattson shows with charts, graphs and testimony, NUMEC had an extraordinarily bad record in this regard. The company was eventually fined over $2 million for missing materials, which, with inflation factored in, would be about $15 million today. Mattson adduces that from 1959 to 1977, about 345 kilograms of HEU went missing from NUMEC, which translates to well over 700 pounds. (ibid, p. 286)
Explaining the Deficits
In just one year, there was a loss of over 56 kilograms (or about 123 pounds). The company made up all sorts of rationales as to why this much HEU was missing, including losses during the mechanical processing. But as the author points out, there are two problems with this accounting.
President Lyndon Johnson accompanies President-elect Richard Nixon to his inauguration on Jan. 20, 1969.
First, no other plant in America reported losses of this magnitude. The AEC concluded that the losses at Apollo were more than double what they were at any other comparably sized atomic plant in the U.S. (ibid, p. 65)
Secondly, even if one chalks up some of the missing HEU to a processing loss, that still does not account for the entire record of NUMEC. Mattson figures that, even giving the company the benefit of the doubt, it still leaves about 200 pounds of missing HEU. (ibid, p. 67) That’s enough for about six atomic bombs, larger than the one used on Hiroshima.
As Mattson reports, what makes NUMEC an even more intriguing suspect is the fact that the company had some legitimate business transactions with Israel, concerning the irradiation of plants. And these legitimate packages were sent at about the time the HEU went missing. Further, the inventory records at NUMEC were extremely sloppy and some appear to have been destroyed in direct violation of the AEC code, meaning NUMEC should have been cited, but wasn’t. (ibid, p. 75)
That brings us to the founders of the NUMEC plant in Apollo, Pennsylvania, a small town of approximately 1,600 people that lies about 30 miles northeast of Pittsburgh. In 1955, the Apollo Steel Plant was purchased by David Lowenthal. Two years later, Lowenthal and Zalman Shapiro cooperated in forming NUMEC.
Shapiro, a very accomplished metallurgist who lived next door to Lowenthal, had been employed for a number of years at the nearby Bettis Atomic Power Laboratory, which supported the AEC’s Office of Naval Reactors.
In May 1958, Lowenthal merged Apollo Steel with the San Toy Mining Company in Maine. San Toy then changed its name to Apollo Industries, with the main operating officers of this new corporation Morton Chatkin, Ivan Novick and Lowenthal. (ibid, p. 43)
The board comprised these three men plus Shapiro, and later others. In the early 1960s, the steel plant’s name was changed to Raychord Steel, but with the decline of the steel industry, Raychord became a subsidiary company to Apollo.
Ties to Zionist Groups
Novick, one of Apollo’s officers, later served as national president of the Zionist Organization of America, in which Chatkin, another officer, also held a leadership role. The ZOA was a member group of the American Zionist Council, which later became the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which today is considered to be the leading lobbying group for Israel and one of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington.
Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin
Novick also later served as a personal liaison between Ronald Reagan’s White House and the administration of Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.
Lowenthal, who was born in Poland in 1921, came to America in 1932 and served in the American armed forces in World War II, eventually becoming a citizen in 1945. After the war, he worked with the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary force inside Palestine, on the Zionist mission to ferry Jews into Palestine in 1947 on board the boat SS Exodus.
Since almost none of the passengers had legal immigration certificates to enter Palestine, the British Royal Navy, which ran the Palestinian Mandate, seized the ship and deported its passengers back to Europe. Lowenthal’s mission was a practical failure, but a tremendous propaganda success for the Zionist cause. The event was novelized by author Leon Uris in the number-one best-selling book Exodus, which was published in 1958 and was made into a movie two years later by director Otto Preminger, starring Paul Newman.
Lowenthal later served on board the ship Pan York, which also attempted to evade the British quarantine but was captured in Cyprus with the crew arrested, including Lowenthal. He escaped and fled to Palestine where he served with the Haganah during the war that broke out there in 1948 after the British abandoned the mandate early. (ibid, p. 44)
Lowenthal ended up serving under the legendary Meir Amit, the leading intelligence officer in Israel during the 1960s. Lowenthal was also personally acquainted with future prime ministers David Ben Gurion and Golda Meir.
Nuclear Experience
Shapiro, who had advanced degrees in chemistry and metallurgy from Johns Hopkins, worked for Westinghouse and the Navy on the nuclear reactor that powered America’s first atomic submarine, the Nautilus. Shapiro also helped develop the fuel for the first commercial nuclear reactor, the Shippingport Atomic Power Station in Pennsylvania.
Like Lowenthal, Novick and Chatkin, Shapiro also was active in supporting Israeli causes, although his activities had a slightly educational tone. He was a member of the Technion Society, which supported advances in Israeli science and technology. Indeed, he became an Honorary Life Member of the group.
He also was a Director of Hillel, an international organization that tries to acquaint Jewish students with each other on campuses and organize student trips to Israel. Like Novick and Chatkin, he was a member of the Zionist Organization of America. Many years later, it was discovered that Shapiro was on the Board of Governors of the Israeli Intelligence Center, which honors spies for Israel who clandestinely advanced the interests of the state. (Mattson, p. 84)
Beyond the individual backgrounds of these four men, there was also something else which should have attracted the U.S. intelligence community’s attention prior to Helms’s meeting with President Johnson. While running NUMEC, both men – Shapiro and Lowenthal – were taking trips to Israel and had contacts with high officials of Israeli intelligence as well as Israel’s version of the AEC.
Further, NUMEC had a guest worker, an Israeli metallurgist, in its plant, as part of an agreement NUMEC had with Israel to serve as a training consultancy which resulted in the formation of a joint company with Israel called ISORAD that initially was to deal with irradiation of citrus fruits through gamma rays. But the FBI later discovered that NUMEC also had contracts with Israel for the development of plutonium oxide as fuel elements in nuclear reactors. (Mattson, pgs. 80-81)
Since Lowenthal had so many acquaintances in high positions, he often visited Israel, including a most curious instance at about the time he purchased Apollo Steel in 1956. It was at this time that Israel was making decisions about foreign sourcing for nuclear materials and technology.
A year later, NUMEC was formed and Shapiro immediately applied for a license from the AEC to process uranium fuel in a building formerly occupied by Apollo Steel. John Hadden, CIA station chief in Tel Aviv, later noted the unusual coincidence of these events on two continents. (ibid, p. 45)
Israeli Visits
But declassified FBI files reveal that the visitations were not just one way, i.e. from Apollo, Pennsylvania, to Israel. There were also visits and meetings of Israeli officials who went to Apollo.
A photograph of a control room at Israel’s Dimona nuclear weapons plant in the 1980s. (Photograph taken by nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, who was later kidnapped and imprisoned by Israel as punishment for revealing its secret nuclear arsenal.)
At the time of those meetings, there were four main branches of Israeli intelligence. The Shin Bet corresponded with the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Mossad with the Central Intelligence Agency; the Aman roughly with the Defense Intelligence Agency; and the LAKAM, which was responsible for security at Dimona and for procuring scientific and technological data from Western sources. (Mattson, p. 108)
In the mid-1960s, France started scaling back its support for the Dimona reactor, which was supposedly a research facility. With France’s pullback, LAKAM began seeking out and purchasing parts and supplies from other sources to complete the project.
LAKAM’s job included concealing the reactor’s true function – the development of a nuclear bomb – from American inspections. (ibid) During an American inspection in 1964, LAKAM even created a “Potemkin village” control room to deceive the visitors.
Unlike American intelligence, Israel also had a special operations unit that served all branches. Established in 1957, it was run by Rafi Eitan and his deputy, Avraham Bendor. (In the 1980s, Eitan became notorious for the Jonathan Pollard spy case, in which Pollard, a navy intelligence employee, was paid tens of thousands of dollars to spy for Israel in the United States with Eitan his ultimate control agent.)
Convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the photo from his U.S. Naval Intelligence ID.
In September 1968, the AEC told the FBI that they were giving permission to NUMEC for a visit by four Israelis, including Eitan and Bendor. However, in the application to the AEC, the occupations of the two were disguised. Eitan was said to be a chemist in the Defense Ministry; Bendor supposedly worked for the electronics division. (ibid, p. 110)
The other two men were Avraham Hermoni, who was billed as a Scientific Counselor in the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and Dr. Ephraim Biegun, described as working in the Division of Electronics for Defense. Again, this was misleading. Hermoni did, at times, work out of Washington’s Israeli Embassy, but his prime and most important function was overseeing and planning Israel’s nuclear weapons program, which he did from 1959-69. Biegun was actually head of the technical division of the Mossad from 1960-70.
CIA Suspicions
After the visit, NUMEC reported that the four men were in Apollo to buy thermo-electrical generator systems. (ibid, p. 119) Why Eitan and Bendor had to be there for that purpose is not readily apparent.
CIA officer John Hadden thought the real reason for the visit was that Shapiro was divulging top-secret technical information about plutonium manufacture – and that he was aided in this by the visiting Israeli scientist working at NUMEC. The FBI later came to agree that this was most likely the true reason for the visit. (ibid, p. 120)
Hermoni revisited Shapiro in November 1968, but the capstone to the visits to Apollo came later that month. As noted previously, France had cut back on its support for Dimona in the mid-1960s, halting the supply of uranium fuel in 1967.
In late November 1968, the Mossad arranged a covert operation called Operation Plumbat, which employed a front company in West Germany to purchase 200 tons of uranium yellowcake from Belgium. The transaction was approved by Euratom, the European organization controlling such transactions, but once the transport ship set sail for the port of Genoa, Italy, it was intercepted by another ship used by the Mossad. When the original ship reached port, the hull was empty.
The timing of this operation, on the heels of the mysterious visits by Israeli intelligence agents to Apollo, seems to constitute powerful circumstantial evidence of Israeli intentions.
Then, right after the completion of the Plumbat mission, who arrived in Israel? None other than Zalman Shapiro. The FBI discovered that in November 1968, in addition to the personal visits, Shapiro was in frequent phone contact with a number of Israeli intelligence agents, including Hermoni. (Mattson, p. 126)
A Longstanding Goal
Israel’s long trail of subterfuge and duplicity was part of a longstanding goal. As early as 1948, David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, stated that what Einstein, Teller and Oppenheimer did for America, they could easily do for Israel, since they were all Jews. In fact, he offered Einstein Israeli citizenship, which the great man declined. (ibid, p. 22) Ben-Gurion then had two meetings with Oppenheimer and numerous ones with Teller.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister
Ultimately, Israel settled on David Bergmann, a brilliant chemist whom Ben-Gurion appointed first chief of the Israel Atomic Energy Commission in 1952. By 1955, Bergmann was essentially running the day-to-day operations of Israel’s atomic program.
In a conversation with the American ambassador, Bergmann said the Israeli science education program was adequate in physics and chemistry but weak in engineering and non-existent in metallurgy. He also revealed that the design he had laid out for a reactor was the same as the one at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, an intriguing clue because Shapiro was a metallurgist and had worked on the Shippingport power station.
Indeed, Shapiro eventually met Bergmann and the two became close friends and colleagues, serving on the board of ISORAD, which was a joint venture of NUMEC and the IAEC. Bergmann made his first visit to America for IAEC in 1956, the year before Lowenthal turned Apollo Steel into NUMEC.
There were two significant investigations of Shapiro and NUMEC. The first was instigated by Dick Helms’s call to Ramsey Clark in 1968 and the discovery of the highly enriched uranium at Dimona. (Mattson, p. 99) The second began in 1976 when Jim Conran, a whistleblower at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, voiced complaints about the background and actions of Shapiro. Conran was a security officer and his warnings eventually got the attention of the White House. (ibid, p. 161)
During the first investigation, the FBI could not find enough evidence to justify a violation by Shapiro of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, which mandates that any person in the U.S. who is representing a foreign country’s interests has to register with the Justice Department. But the FBI did recommend cancelling Shapiro’s security clearances, based on wiretaps that revealed Shapiro in close contact with Israeli intelligence officials and with members of the IAEC. (ibid, p. 138)
During these calls Shapiro reportedly said he would help Israel in any way that he could. He also expressed frustration with the new ownership at NUMEC, which had been purchased by ARCO. But his Israeli contacts said he was too valuable to leave and encouraged him to stay there. (ibid, p. 139)
FBI Surveillance
One of the most curious episodes that the FBI surveillance revealed was a meeting between Shapiro and a man named Jeruham Kafkafi, a suspected Mossad officer working under diplomatic cover. He had left Washington by air on the morning of June 20, 1969, and met Shapiro at the Pittsburgh airport for about an hour. He then left and flew back to Washington.
As a result of that surveillance, Shapiro was interviewed by the AEC in August 1969, with some of Shapiro’s answers to questions rather dubious. For instance, he said he did not know Hermoni was in charge of the Israeli nuclear development program and thought he was a university professor. Shapiro said his discussions in September and October 1968 with the Israeli officers were about water contamination, saboteur detection and military activities.
When asked why the Israelis could not have talked to the Defense Department about those topics, Shapiro had no answer. The interviewer wrote in his summary that Shapiro was cool and calm throughout except when the Kafkafi meeting was brought up. At first, Shapiro said he could not recall it, even though it happened just two months earlier. He then said he did remember it, claiming it was about an overdue invoice and a power supply resource. (p. 142)
The AEC investigators did not find the last reply credible, since it did not seem to justify an airline flight from Washington to Pittsburgh and back. Shapiro adjusted his answer by saying that there was some discussion of an investigator whom he knew from America who was going to visit Israel. He also added the figure of $32,000 as to how much Israel owed NUMEC. As Mattson notes, again, this explanation does not seem to justify an air flight and an hour-long meeting with a clandestine Mossad officer.
Closing the Inquiry
The man who ultimately decided to close this initial inquiry was Glenn Seaborg, head of the AEC. Not only did he not see any civil or criminal charges as being viable, but when President Richard Nixon’s Attorney General John Mitchell recommended revoking Shapiro’s security clearances, Seaborg balked at that also.
Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.
Mattson clearly sees Seaborg as being a villain in the piece. Late in the book, he explicitly accuses him of running a cover-up. (see p. 297) And, there is evidence to back up this charge. It was later discovered, during the second inquiry, that Seaborg had a close personal friendship with Shapiro. (ibid p. 268)
Earle Hightower, assistant director of safeguards at AEC, explicitly stated that the whole case regarding NUMEC was rigged because it was known that Seaborg would not take action. Little more than three years after Seaborg left the AEC, it was dissolved in 1975 and was replaced by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, in part, because critics accused the AEC of an insufficiently aggressive regulatory program.
The second, much longer, and more vigorous inquiry into NUMEC and Shapiro came about at the creation of the NRC when Jim Conran was tasked with reviewing the record of how safeguards had worked previously for the AEC so they could be strengthened in the future. In that review process, he came across the case of Shapiro and NUMEC.
When Conran asked to see more files on both, he was denied access, causing him to go up the NRC ladder to Chairman William Anders, who was briefed by, among others, Carl Duckett of the CIA. Since Anders was about to leave for a diplomatic post, he took his concerns to James Connor at President Gerald Ford’s White House.
In March 1976, the CIA’s Duckett addressed an informal gathering of pilots and astronauts, saying there was little doubt Israel had about 20 nuclear warheads. Although this was supposed to be off the record, the information leaked. In April 1976, Time reported that this claim was accurate, except the newsmagazine put the size of the arsenal at 13 bombs and added that the warheads could be delivered by Phantom jets or Jericho missiles.
Duckett wrote a memo to CIA Director George Bush in which he said he suspected that the Israeli program was jumpstarted by a diversion of enriched uranium from the NUMEC plant. (p. 165) He attached various appendices to the memo to show the results of previous inquiries into NUMEC and explain why his belief was justified.
One of the appendices consisted of a paper by John Hadden in which he expressed the suspicion that NUMEC was actually a shell company the Israeli government had set up for the express purpose of diverting materials, technology and information that Israel needed to speed up and facilitate its longstanding quest for atomic weapons. (ibid, p. 166)
A New Investigation
Attorney General Edward Levi was then sent a summary of the FBI’s previous investigation of NUMEC. Levi alerted Ford that he thought NUMEC was culpable for several crimes and, with Ford’s permission, he wished to begin a criminal inquiry. Since Ford’s close adviser James Connor was also disturbed by these findings, the President approved the investigation.
What followed was a tedious bureaucratic battle between the CIA and FBI. The FBI felt it did not have direct proof that a diversion had taken place, while the CIA had the proof — the chemical tests at Dimona — but was reluctant to reveal the intelligence to the FBI. Also, the CIA did not want to furnish the FBI with technical experts to help educate the investigating agents so they could effectively cross-examine important witnesses. Thus, the FBI’s inquiry dragged on through three presidents: Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
But even with these obstructions, the FBI did eventually find witnesses to a diversion from the Apollo plant. It turned out that the FBI did not do enough interviews of plant employees in its initial inquiry because there were at least four of them willing to talk. Those witnesses form the climax of Mattson’s book.
In 1980, one witness said that when he read newspaper accounts about the losses of enriched uranium at Apollo, he had to chuckle to himself. When asked why, he replied that in 1965 or 1966, he was walking near the loading dock at Apollo and saw people loading containers – the dimensions that were used for HEU packets – into equipment boxes. He noticed that the shipping papers for the boxes revealed that the packages were destined for Israel. This witness then suggested some other workers at the plant who had seen similar activity. (Ibid, p. 272)
Suspicion Shipment
One of these witnesses saw a flatbed truck backed up into the loading dock area with Shapiro pacing around the area while the driver was loading “stove pipes” into a cabinet on the truck. This struck the witness as odd because the plant had regularly assigned workers for loading duties during the day but this shipment was being prepared in the evening. He explained that “stove pipes” were cylindrical containers that the plant used to pack enriched uranium inside. Each stove pipe usually contained three or four packets of HEU.
When he glanced at the clipboard resting on a package, he saw the destination was Israel. The clipboard then was yanked away and an armed guard escorted him off the dock. He also said it was unusual to see Shapiro in this area of the plant, and further, that Shapiro was very seldom there at night. (ibid, p. 275)
There were two other witnesses who told the FBI about similar events. The FBI also interviewed an NRC inspector named James Devlin, who told the agents that, contrary to what Shapiro had said, the security at the Apollo plant was below par and that NUMEC did not employ a professional security force. The company had one regular armed guard and Devlin happened to know who he was, since he was also a deputy for the township. The only other guards were unarmed and non-uniformed. (ibid, pgs. 272-73)
By this time, the FBI did not want to continue the investigation, believing that nothing would come of it, although the Justice Department urged the investigators on. But the FBI was correct since, as Mattson notes more than once in his book, the last president who really wanted to stop Israel from becoming a nuclear power was John F. Kennedy. (See pgs. 38-40, p. 256)
Richard Helms’s conversation with a disinterested President Johnson underscores how that attitude changed after Kennedy’s death. As Mattson further notes, opposition to Israel’s nuclear-weapons program was more or less negated by President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir in 1969 when he agreed that the U.S. would not make any public statements revealing Israel’s nuclear arsenal nor demand that it sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty, as long as Israel did no testing and made no public threats.
Even that policy was probably violated in 1979 with the Vela Incident: a suspected Israeli nuclear test done in the Indian Ocean.
Author Roger Mattson
Author Roger Mattson was part of the inquiry about the illegal transfer of atomic secrets to Israel, working in the NRC’s safeguards department when Conran first voiced his fears about a diversion at NUMEC. Thus, Mattson became part of an internal review of the Shapiro case, seeing firsthand how certain intelligence agencies were, by accident or design, obstructing the investigation.
Mattson concludes his important book by stating that this policy of casting a deliberate blind eye towards a nuclear heist by Israel places the U.S. in a compromised position when trying to enforce a policy of non-proliferation on other nations because of the obvious double standards.
To point out one paradox, the U.S. government executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for purportedly supplying nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union with less evidence. Plus, the tinder box of the Middle East is probably the last place where America should have allowed atomic weapons to proliferate, but it did.
Because of that, the U.S. has little or no moral authority on the issue today.
James DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His most recent book is Reclaiming Parkland.
Roger Mattson at a conference presenting the info in his book:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITbCZreKhZY
BTW this is an interesting conference with important speakers.
I just ran into an interesting article at the Tikun Olam site. The author says that Israel tapped wealthy US Jews for the money needed, and ran a bluff with the French to get the reactor needed to produce Plutonium. I got the impression he is rather confused about several factors, but these aspects of the project make sense. Given the number of explosions the French ran in the South Pacific, it wouldn’t surprise me if a few Israeli nukes were slipped into the test program. Otherwise they’d never be quite sure if the Bomb Secrets they stole (or were given) from the US were real, or tampered with like the bomb blueprints the US gave to Iran.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/09/16/shimon-peres-stole-bomb-bluff-military-censor-doesnt-want-israelis-know/
Mr Parry,
I do hope you are not under another hack attack as I had to use three different ways to access this site from the normal means. This is all between 10p and 11p west coast time.
Safari and Firefox and a less known serf were all having issues and your page could not be be called up, or it was determined unknown. Pages being read would just disappear and the site would as well. We’ll try hard to get you your needed 30K for a good IT firewall. Hopefully all is well.
Just so you know that there are issues going on ( I’m sure some would prefer I not add my thoughts, but at least others should be able to)
Ultimately it cannot be stolen, because it works by the laws of of physics: which are fully accessible to anyone, anywhere, and anywhen.
Those apply universally, not just worldwide. It’s only a matter of time till someone reads Nature’s book.
i believe the author made a small factual era when he referred to lbj as helms’ commander-in-chief. the president is only commander-in-chief of the active military – not even the national guard, unless activated.
perhaps i’m mistaken. check it out.
The same powerful forces behind the concept and formation of the State of Israel were behind the effort to give them atomic weapons. The Deep State, an international organization heavily influenced by wealthy Zionists, decides who gets what and will never allow investigations into their own covert activities. They control the courts, the intelligence agencies, law enforcement, and politicians.
A great article, Mr. DiEugenio. Thanks from every American for doing such a fine job.
Also, thanks to Robert Parry for posting this, and on such a momentous date. I had about written you off as a serious journalist, Mr. Parry. I was wrong.
If LBJ participated in the presidential assassination to gain presidency. There is nothing he can do in office except obey every orders, in order to keep his conspiracy a secret.
If LBJ was not in compromised position, then he was supportive of the heist at the very least, if not actively orchestrating obstructions to justice.
What else will follow, when the top position of a country is compromised for many generation. As a rotten apples sit among fresh apples.
Exactly Khanh, each party was held captive by the others, and that is what made it such a “toxic” mix…
“IL NOME, IL NOME”!!
What is the title (publishing co etc, date) of Mattson’s book?
(Quotation is from opera by Leoncavallo, “PAGLIACO”, late 19th c.)
—-Peter Loeb, Boston, MA, USA
Israel stabbed LBJ in the back when they broke off their attack on the USS Liberty after the torpedo fired from a US Navy submarine hit her–but she didn’t sink. The IDF was supposed to finish the ship off, but reneged on the deal and used it as blackmail.
It’s why LBJ didn’t run in 1968.
Sure. Fooled us all. USN torpedoes USN.
What unadulterated BS!!
Nonsense. It can’t have been – if it had, I see no reason why L.B.J wouldn’t have exposed it and used it to launch a war to install a pro-American regime.
Scott, shame on you passing so much hot air for fact. You want the USN to be sharing the blame with Israel? You sre such a zionist troll. Be carefull what you zionist say or you msy loose another sub in the Med. Read the accounts of the sailors and the PT boats making an attack run on the ship.
What Israel had on LBJ was his complicity in the JFK assassination. Nicr try.
Considering that LBJ buried any investigation into Israel’s relentless and murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 during the Six Day War, his reaction to this scandal does not surprise me in the least:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjOH1XMAwZA
I have also been amazed that during all the brouhaha over the “Iran Deal” regarding stopping them from developing a nuclear weapon not one mention anywhere of the fact that Israel is known to possess anywhere between 200-500 nuclear weapons and the missile systems to deliver them, certainly to Iran.
Also take note of the fact that the media will always mention big Iranian demonstrations where thousands are bellowing, “Death to America!” but no mention of the CIA’s overthrow of Iran’s democratically elected president Mossedegh in 1953 by the CIA and the installation of the Shah and his bloody Savak that tortured thousands of Iranians.
Incredible.
TO “ABBYBWOOD”…
I have consistently urged in these spaces that an agreement concentrating
on Iran and its “capacity” to make and have nuclear weapons (and WMD) be
subject to the same (or similar) agreement as the “Iran Deal”. Including
“Protocol” for said deal (see Gareth Porter’s book). This must include
close and independent random inspections of ALL Israeli sites, the
dismantling of all such sites, sanctions and (if necessary embargo) of
Israel for any non-compliance.
As with the American expression: “What’s good for the goose is
good for the gander.” With appologies to the Islamic Republic for
use of “goose”. It is only an old saying.
I have further often suggested the many recommendations of the
UN General Assembly for a Mideast Nuclear Free Zone.This has
always been blocked in the UN Security Council.
Many international states must be involved including the USA. The
US cannot act as a primary nation in charge of the execution
of this agreement for obvious reasons. The U must sign and
ratify this agreement.
The Mideast Nuclear Free Zone has always included the signing and
ratification of the NPT by Israel.
Thanks, Abbybwood for, once again, pointing out the
outrageous hypocrisy of US policy in public statements etc.
—Peter Loeb,Boston, MA, USA
So did the so called “depleted” uranium first used by Israel in its assault on Egypt originally come from the U.S. as it was refined for Israel’s atomic bombs and having been “depleted” found a home as a hot tipped cannon round?
Now we know who are behind JFK’s assassination
Shut up.
Yada, yada ……same ole story different day…..Exposing Israel means nothing…….USA = no balls….Who controls the money (US Dollar) controls the agenda…….As I have stated before….the parasites love and control the US dollar……Take the dollar away…. the parasites starve
“Stealing” the atom bomb is exactly the same as “stealing” Palestinian land. International law provides no mechanisms for stateless peoples to establish a state of their own. Therefore new states must be established through violence.
The Jews invented the atom bomb. It’s ridiculous to say they “stole” it. By its nature, an atom bomb must be state property. Since there was no Jewish state before 1948, the Jews who invented the atom bomb were necessarily citizens of non-Jewish states. Once a Jewish state existed, transfer of the bomb to this state was legally problematical, in exactly the same way as the establishment of Israel itself was legally problematical.
But “illegal” is not the same as “unjust”.
Obviously the theft of Palestine by the zionists was unjust:
1. No one is owed a state at the expense of non-consenting persons.
2. The Jews were not stateless; they chose to go there from other nations.
3. Many other locations were considered that did not involve violent takeovers.
4. Violence is not justified by pretending a lack of peaceful means to a fanatical project.
Obviously Jews did not “invent the atomic bomb.” Those who were involved are celebrated by the Jewish media and are a small minority of the theorists and others involved.
Your attempt to pretend that it was not a theft by pretense that only a nation could do so is no more than devious.
No one here will be fooled by such nonsense.
Err, he DID say that it was theft, idiot. (stop with your trash about Jewish control of the media.) That being said, what was that babble about Israel’s atomic bombs not being Israeli because the atomic bomb was invented in the United States? S.O.N.A.R was invented in the United States – does that mean every country whose Navy has S.O.N.A.R systems has technology owned by the United States?
RRT, no we will never stop talking about the Jewish controlled media, Hollywood, banking, pornography, Senate Arms committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the US elections and on and on. This is not the first time in history that you suck dry and destroy your host country but it just may be your last.
Of course LBJ did nothing.
He saw what happened when you go against the tribe.
Ladybird told him she liked what was left of his head of hair.
The zionists are pure evil
I haven’t read the book, and so I’m guessing with my next remarks. Though this essay concentrates on the physical enriched uranium, it also mentions “atomic secrets”. Think of the recent stories about North Korea’s 5th nuclear test. That nation is – as is usually the case – struggling to miniaturize the Bomb to fit atop a missile. This task is neither trivial nor simple, but Israel has not done the endless series of trials and tests to guarantee the hundreds of weapons they’ve put together actually work.
A person must deduce from this that the murderous little nation was given the Keys To the Kingdom, or everything the US knew about making nuclear weapons. EVERYTHING!
Fropm the Wiki:
“t has been reported that Israel has several other nuclear weapons capabilities:
Suitcase bomb: Seymour Hersh reports that Israel developed the ability to miniaturize warheads small enough to fit in a suitcase by the year 1973.[177]
Tactical nuclear weapon: Israel may also have 175 mm and 203 mm self-propelled artillery pieces, capable of firing nuclear shells. There are three battalions of the 175mm artillery (36 tubes), reportedly with 108 nuclear shells and more for the 203mm tubes. If true, these low yield, tactical nuclear artillery rounds could reach at least 25 miles (40 km), while by some sources it is possible that the range was extended to 45 miles (72 km) during the 1990s.[1]
EMP strike capabilities: Israel allegedly possesses several 1 megaton bombs,[178][179] which give it a very large EMP attack ability.[180] For example, if a megaton-class weapon were to be detonated 400 kilometers above Omaha, Nebraska, US, nearly the entire continental United States would be affected with potentially damaging EMP experience from Boston to Los Angeles and from Chicago to New Orleans.[181] A similar high-altitude airburst above Iran could cause serious damage to all of the electrical systems in the Middle East, and much of Europe.[182]
Enhanced Radiation Weapon (ERW): Israel also is reported to have an unknown number of neutron bombs.[1]
Nuclear land mine: Israel supposedly has deployed multiple defensive nuclear land mines in the Golan Heights.[183][184]”
All they had to do was cookbook bomb-making – use the stolen uranium and the blueprints and make copies of anything the US had designed and tested for their own use.
This involved treason on a massive scale, but like with the USS Liberty attack, it was all covered up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapons_and_Israel#Other
Good observation Zachary. Reverse engineering and producing suitable knock offs is the way to go. If it weren’t a successful way to produce efficient product, why we wouldn’t have patent laws and copyrights to protect a product from being pirated. Good observation on your part.
Thank you Roger Mattson for this research, and James DiEugenio for this excellent article. I suspect that the story goes much, much further, with Israel receiving actual equipment, weapons parts, and entire warheads and delivery systems from Jews working in US weapons plants, most likely with campaign bribes and other payoffs to higher officials, and bribes all along the way.
“this policy of casting a deliberate blind eye towards a nuclear heist by Israel places the U.S. in a compromised position when trying to enforce a policy of non-proliferation on other nations because of the obvious double standards.”
Double standards has never stopped the U.S. government from saying or doing anything. Still, on the nuclear issue Israel fulfills all the qualifications to be labelled a “rogue state”, including the most serious charge of being a known proliferator (assisting South Africa’s apartheid government in acquiring a nuclear weapon).
That Israel has stolen nuclear materials and constructed nuclear weapons is old news. That we still give them over 4 billion a year is the real story. This is direct economic aid, equal to a 500 dollar check for each Israeli from old Uncle Sam, you and me. That’s over 10 dollars a head from every man woman and child in the U.S. At what point do we get honest about this looting of the American Treasury? Our aid is based on a false premise and a giant lie told to the American electorate for over 3 decades now. If American voters knew the truth this would not be our policy.
So you’re saying, since you mention “for over 3 decades now”, that Israel’s actions prior to the end of the First Lebanon War were justified, whereas it’s actions afterward are not? That would put you at odds with most of the commenters here, who are more critical of Israeli foreign policy.
the Six Day War had marked the beginning of open hostilities between the Israelis and Arab nation states
The brazen attack by Israeli air and naval forces on the USS Liberty on June 6th during the Six-Day War demonstrated how contemptuous the Israelis could be of the United States and how they could get away with mass murder of Americans.
Lyndon Johnson covered up the attack on the Liberty for the Israelis and, according to this article, he went to bat for them on nuclear weapons indicating he might have been the master of the US senate and the leader who pushed through civil rights legislation, but when it came to Israel he was like so many presidents before and since just another puppet whose soul was owned by Israel. The same shameful assessment applies to almost all politicians in Congress. So, what is so exceptional about the United States that it is just another dog wagged by the Israeli tail?
USS Liberty ‘take one’. 911 ‘ take two’
It will take years for people to understand.
See also Grant F. Smith, Divert!: Numec, Zalman Shapiro and the Diversion of Us Weapons Grade Uranium Into the Israeli Nuclear Weapons Program, available at https://www.amazon.com/Divert-Shapiro-diversion-weapons-uranium/dp/0982775709/antiwarbookstore.
Hillary’s connections to Israel should accompany any articles about Israel during this 2016 election time:
Hillary’s bigotry: Netanyahu supporting Hillary wrote a political love letter in November 2015 to this war criminal against Gaza promising his complete support and a visit to the White House within the month that she occupies it.
My hope is that means never.
How I Would Reaffirm Unbreakable Bond With Israel — and Benjamin Netanyahu Hillary Clinton November 4, 2015
Read more: http://forward.com/opinion/nat…..
What a disappointment Obama has been as the first man of color to be president of these United States. I pray to “whatever gods may be” to save us from the absolute horror of having the monster — the destroyer — that is Hillary Clinton as our first woman president.
Let Trump the Builder inaugurate an American renaissance. Let the Trump Era begin, and let Ivanka Trump be our first woman president in 2024.
Jeff…
I am not sure who will win the presidency and I don’t care because they both will end up working for Israel.
What I am sure of is that you, I and all our fellow Americans will loose.
Why does this come as no surprise?
This is a very interesting article. One or two points. It should be pointed out that when the author states that Israel made a preemptive strike on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iran – those counties had come together to attack and destroy Israel. The attack was thwarted by Israel’s air strike on the Egyptian air force and the ground forces of the other countries who were in the process of attacking Israel.
The other point is that the people on the ships that the British would not allow to enter Palestine were fleeing for the lives from the Nazis – that fact should be enough to allow them humanitarian entry. The British acted shamefully because they did not want to have British Petroleum Company interests in Arab lands threatened.
Otherwise it is a very good article.
Fellow, if you’re going to write propaganda for the murderous little shithole of a nation, try to stick to reality at least a little bit. Your description of the 1967 Land Grab War is pitiful – right out of something they must teach in grade school in Israel.
And exactly what is it you don’t understand about “After the war” and “1947”?
Actually he was right about the first part, but not the second. That being said, the reason those countries attacked Israel was because they didn’t recognize it, which is understandable as most Palestinians were opposed to Israel’s creation, and since they had to give up their land, I don’t blame them.
What does a person do about 9/11 truthers, global warming deniers, KKK boys and girls, and those who believe Israel is always the poor innocent victim? Precious little! They’ll either learn what happened, or they won’t.
Israel used the well-publicized Jewish suffering during WW2 to grease the skids for the first massive theft of land in Palestine. This was assisted by the grand scale of the sympathetic news coverage by the media of the day. The “Poor Little Israel” who ‘barely survived” the War Of Independence somehow managed to become strong enough for a successful invasion of Egypt.in a second and seldom-publicized Land Grab effort in 1956.
Eisenhower, at the height of US power and prestige, halted and reversed that one. So the murderous little nation bided its time, stoked the publicity of “Poor Little Israel In Peril” until it was ready for some really massive stealing of land and water. Part of the buildup leading to the war was to provoke the King of Jordan to a mindless rage. He’d done his very best to be a good neighbor, but Israel’s endless provocations culminated with a murderous raid on Jordan in 1966.
hXXp://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/frus11_18_66.html
(notice the source here – the Zionists KNOW they have a death grip on the US media, and have no reluctance at all to be quite frank about what they’ve done and plan to do)
If King Hussein hadn’t been willing to go to war with Israel in 1967, that war of choice wouldn’t have happened then! Stealing the West Bank and illegally holding on to it was part and parcel of the entire 1967 Land Grab War.
An academic translated an interview with Moshe Dyan.
Dayan admits Israel attacked Syria in land grab
hXXp://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51a/022.html
This frankness extends all the way back to the beginning with the Jewish State was still in the planning stages.
Ben Gurion’s Plan for Regional Conquest and Israeli Empire
The conspiracy to create a Jewish State can be dated back nearly 200 years. Forcing the hand of God with the Second Coming has been the life work of many people for generations.
It’s a fact that there are millions of innocents who believe the carefully generated propaganda and fairy-tale histories as truth. That’s a shame, but it’s also a reality of the world of 2016. And does that murderous little shithole of a nation ever exploit that fact!
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2016/09/01/ben-gurions-plan-regional-conquest/
I forgot to check the link – and it failed.
Zachary, truth in many ways, that others can’t seem to grasp.
I wonder when Israel will finally run out of ‘sympathy cards’ over their version of the Holocaust which helps them create some moral reason to kill and butcher others. The Jews are the thieves of this land and it seems way over the heads of many. Moshe Dayan was a terrorist of the first order, but now he is considered a statesman of course.
And the new generation must relearn the deaths many went through during that awful time in history.The Jews are not the only ones, as terrible as it was. There is a Jewish Virtual Website which reports a lot of historical data from the 30’s onward to WW2. I don’t know the authors but I do some of what they report from my German studies.
There are considered more than 5 million non-Jewish deaths at Hitlers’ hands during this Holocaust period. The first were the Poles, of which it has been reported 6 million were killed by the Nazis since Hitler wanted to wipe out the Poles. Himmler declared the death of all Poles. In addition were gypsies, communists, non-light haired children, and the list goes on. The Library declares that 3 million Polish Jews were killed along with 3 million Polish Christians. The estimate of liquidation (bad choice of words) is in the 11 millions.
Why are we not creating memorials for those murders? Are the Jews the only victims of the Holocaust? Absolutely not, but why does it seem they are the only ones mentioned who bring tears to the US eyes? As if only the Jews were the victims?
So now there will be another land grab for the Golan Heights to steal more water and potential oil (all they need is another world distraction or some shady deal), and many in the US will think this is holy justice for Israel rather than pure theft of land belonging to none of them.
When you write many truths to educate the ignorant, it also boils my blood that it even has to be mentioned at all to the educated people on this site. (Leibergall excluded in the ‘educated’ part of course)
Thanks Zachary, carry on.
And p.s. to some on this site. To be against land grabs, deaths of innocents in Gaza, the USS LIberty, and Israels’ bad behavior is not “anti-semitic” as much as this verbiage is the cliche, colloquial, and standard disclaimer used by some people who can’t defend the evil Israel has wrought. Or know nothing of it to begin with usually.
As I’ve heard it, they weren’t so much fleeing the Nazi’s as they were responding to propaganda disseminated by the Zionists.
Total malarkey.
Point one: No, the Arab countries were not massing for an attack on Israel. The preemptive Israeli attack was completely unprovoked. It was a pre-planned criminal attack in violation of all international law. Its purpose was the seizure of the West Bank and Gaza, the completion of the Zionist goal of the taking of all of Palestine.
Point two: The claim that those ships with Jewish refugees headed for Palestine were fleeing the Nazis is stupidly wrong. The war was over, the Nazis defeated. At that point any remnant Nazis were changing their names and fleeing for their lives. The plan was the continued “colonization” — ie invasion — of Palestine so as to increase the number of Jews in anticipation of the subsequent military assault on the Palestinians and eventual military conquest of all of Palestine.
The entire Zionist project was, and continues to be, a geopolitical crime-in-progress. Consistent with their 5000 year record of aggression and abuse, this modern Jewish attempt at suicide-by-Goy will yet again lead to Jewish suffering and death. “Blowback” — the Jews call it “persecution” — is logical and inevitable. The Jews’ clueless tribalist aggression is not sustainable, for obvious reasons: the rest of the world will not long tolerate it. Their nukes will not save them when the seeds the Zionists have themselves planted, the seeds of the “next” holocaust eventually bear lethal fruit. Sad.
I can only hope, as an American and a Jew, that the diaspora communities survive to reinvigorate the ancient Jewish values of justice and civility.
The only Arab country that had any troops near Israel was Egypt. Nasser had two divisions in the Sinai and Israel knew that those two divisions could not start an attack. “The poor little zionist state that could, was about to be thrown into the sea” is such an old lie, you gotta be kidding to recycle it again or you need to update your information.
The thing is if any other country had behaved like this and stolen nuclear technology and hardware from the US that country would probably not exist now. What has Israel got on the US that makes this possible I have to ask myself ? We may never know of course as their control is practically total now.
William, I’m like you where my head goes to what could the Israeli’s have had on some certain someone’s in our government, in order to get away with so much known quantities of espionage? Another question involving Israel around the same time in the sixties, was why were the rescue planes that were deployed to help the embattled USS Libery called off from finishing their mission to aid the targeted ship from it’s attackers? All though there are even more disturbing questions that go unanswered, such as the who, what, and why, of Jonathan Pollards spying escapades that evaporate into thin air and away from the American public’s notice, which only adds even more layers of questionable scrutiny undone. Is this the price America pays to support the one and only Middle East democracy, which it proclaims itself to be? Maybe that ‘democracy’ claim should be commented on by a Palestintian.
I don’t believe the Israeli’s had anything, or much to do with the JFK assassination, but I do ponder to what Meyer Lansky may have had in regard to any knowledge concerning certain characters who may have been behind JFK’s fateful demise. Imagine what having that kind of knowledge could bring you, if you weren’t killed for knowing it. Picture another country who is well protected, and loved, and what they could do with that kind of blackmail bait. William, if you were able to guard against any retaliation by the accused, why you would certainly have gained access to the highest office in the land. Let’s face it, starting around two o’clock on 11/22/63 for many LBJ was the prime suspect for the murder of his well loved predecessor. So, was there anything sustainable enough for anyone seeking access to pressure America into supporting their apartheid state?
Lastly, the one party who would have benefited the most over the JFK assassination would be not the party of murders who did the dirty deed, but the party of observers who watched it all go down. Being in the middle of all that ugliness, and not getting your own hands dirty, would in my mine be the most perfect position to be in. If you were able to protect yourself, and you could very well do that by possessing your own nuclear arsenal, you would more than likely go untouched. Add to that you would raise the biggest DC lobby group, and strong arm congressional people to your cause, why you would attain such power that nothing on earth would be able to rival your targets and goals.
Listen to Netanyahu describe how the Palestintian’s wish to ethnically cleanse Israel, and listen to the response given by the White House.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/1.741299
Joe, thanks for your response. I think you’re right to separate the Government of Israel from Meyer Lansky and I also like your linking Lansky with both The JFK assassination and LBJ. Clearly there were mutual “interests. The Castro Brothers put an end to Syndicate business in Cuba and they (The Syndicate) needed to either re-establish it or re-locate it to another area, and that would be Nevada. Read “the Money and the Power” by Sally Denton and Roger Morris.
https://www.amazon.com/Money-Power-Making-Vegas-America/dp/0375701265/ref=sr_1_3/159-0439130-0788609?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1473701377&sr=1-3&keywords=roger+morris
Listen Bob, everyone and anyone has a theory about the JFK assassination, but Lansky having insider knowledge to me doesn’t sound so far fetched, as all of that. Like I said with my comment, the observer to such a crime would be in a better position than the actual killers would be. Yes, the actual killers would now be in a position to take over the White House, but the observer having not really being the one to pull the trigger would be in a better place, because they would be innocent of the crime, but able to blackmail the criminal killers to their fullest advantage. After Kennedy’s assassination there could have been many who would have been able to gain influence over on LBJ, but not many would have been in such a position as to avoid their own death. Avoiding death would have been the key towards being able to hold such a crime over someone’s head, and a country with their own nukes and people in influential positions would be all you would need to gain access to the highest office in the land.
I see what you’re saying, thanks Joe.
The israelies never needed to blackmail LBJ. He was pro-Zionist, had jewish roots, and was a cooperative participant in their scams long before he entered the White House. He got to be vice president by blackmailing JFK and after that he was only one murder away from his goal. You can find more information at Wide Awake Gentile. Here’s the link:
https://wideawakegentile.wordpress.com/2016/01/06/lyndon-johnson-and-james-angleton-the-cryto-jews-who-ruled-america/
Israel has a political machine in the US that can ensure that any person seeking high political office MUST support Israel. If that person indicates that they will treat the Israelis and the Palestinians equally that person will not be elected. Simple really.
More reports like this and less liberal style hitpieces on Trump Mr. Parry. Dont be like the Washington Post or NY Times. You’re better than that.
“Liberal style hit pieces”? Actually, those articles are correct. And while Consortium News, The New York Times, and the Washington Post don’t like Trump, it’s reasons for doing so are different, and it is not anything like them.
“In just one year, there was a loss of over 56 kilograms (or about 123 pounds). The company made up all sorts of rationales as to why this much HEU was missing, including losses during the mechanical processing. But as the author points out, there are two problems with this accounting”.
Actually, three problems. The third (and arguably most urgent) would be: what happened to the missing 700 lb of uranium if, as the company maintained, it was not misappropriated but “lost in processing”? Physicists and engineers are familiar with the Law of Conservation of Mass, which states very clearly that uranium cannot just disappear from this world. If it is “lost in processing”, it would have to go somewhere. Into a river, a lake, a water table, the ground, the air… which would you prefer if you lived in that area?
Your questions are excellent…and should have been setting off alarms somewhere in the system. But I’ll take your question and make a point , seemingly unrelated to this article. The Twin Towers freefall collapse ,including Building #7 several hours later was a free fall as good as any controlled demolition. The material for those controlled charges was Nanothermite. Here is only one of many articles ….and in reading it you’ll see that to get the Nanothermite necessary …there has to be the same complicity as took place in this article . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Center_controlled_demolition_conspiracy_theories So, considering that the Trade complex buildings has a company owned by Israeli’s…and the owner who had just acquired the complex upped his values for loss on his insurance happened to be Jewish, the thought is that the Mossad was in on it.
Don’t talk about anything that has nothing to do with the topic – or any point that has been refuted a thousand times.