UN: Destroyed Syrian facility resembled a nuclear reactor

A year ago, on 6 September 2007, Israel stealthily attacked and destroyed a facility in north-east Syria. The more interesting aspect of the operation was not the attack itself — Israel has destroyed military facilities deep inside the territory of Arab countries in the past; rather, it was the first large-scale information warfare on record: Israel used software-based attacks to take down and paralyze Syrian power and communication systems throughout, making the stealthy attack even more stealthy by blinding the Syrian military and its sophisticated, Russian-built air defense systems for about an hour-and-half.

Israel kept mum about the attack for months, but under pressure from Congress for more details about the attack, the Bush administration last April offered documentations to support its assertion that the target Israel destroyed was a nuclear reactor in the making. Syria vehemently denied this assertion, but what did not help the Syrian claims was the fact that in the weeks and months following the September attack, Syrian officials offered many different, and contradictory, explanations as what exactly was being done in the remote facility.

Israel and the United States have now received support from the first independent investigation of the suspected Syrian nuclear site: a just-released UN report bolsters U.S. claims that Damascus was building a secret nuclear reactor. The report also confirmed the discovery of traces of uranium amid the ruins. The Washington Post’s Joby Worrick writes that officials with the UN’s atomic agency stopped short of declaring the wrecked facility a nuclear reactor, but they said it strongly resembled one. “While it cannot be excluded that the building in question was intended for non-nuclear use, the features of the building … are similar to what may be found in connection with a reactor site,” the report said. The investigators also noted that Syria had gone to great lengths — including elaborate “landscaping” with tons of freshly imported soil — to alter the site before admitting outsiders. Despite the apparent cleanup effort, environmental sampling by U.N. inspectors turned up traces of uranium, the fissile metal used in nuclear reactors, according to the report by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the world body’s nuclear watchdog. By itself, though, the discovery of uranium was not conclusive, and IAEA officials said they are evaluating several possible explanations.

A senior U.N. official, in describing the uranium finding, said soil collected from areas that had not been obviously landscaped contained “significant” amounts of uranium. Worrick quotes the UN official to say that uranium is present in nature, but that the particles discovered by the IAEA teams had been “chemically” manipulated by humans but not “enriched,” the official said, referring to the highly complex process of converting uranium into forms used in nuclear weapons. “In our view, this kind of material should not be there,” he said.