JERUSALEM — A Syrian site bombed by Israel in September was probably a plant for assembling a nuclear bomb, an Israeli nuclear expert said Thursday, challenging other analysts’ conclusions that it housed a North Korean-style nuclear reactor.
Tel Aviv University chemistry professor Uzi Even, who worked in the past at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor, said satellite pictures of the site taken before the Israeli strike on Sept. 6 showed no sign of the cooling towers and chimneys characteristic of reactors.
Even said the absence of telltale features of a reactor convinced him the building must have housed something else. And a rush by the Syrians after the attack to bury the site under tons of soil suggests the facility was a plutonium processing plant and they were trying to smother lethal doses of radiation leaking out.
Israel has maintained an almost total official silence over the strike, which Syria said hit an unused military installation. But foreign media reports, some quoting unidentified U.S. officials, have said the strike hit a nuclear facility made with North Korean help and modeled on the North’s Yongbyon reactor.
Damascus denies it has an undeclared nuclear program, and North Korea has said it was not involved in any Syrian nuclear project.
Last month, American analyst David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, said commercial satellite images taken before and after the Israeli raid supported suspicions that the target was indeed a reactor and that the site was given a hasty cleanup by the Syrians to remove incriminating evidence.
Albright saw a clue in the fact that the structure was roofed at an early stage in its construction.
Even said he believes the Syrian cleanup, in which large quantities of soil were bulldozed over the site, was an attempt to smother lethal radiation from a plutonium processing plant.
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