In the News

Jeffrey Lewis in The New Yorker | 'A Strike in the Dark; What did Israel bomb in Syria?'

February 11, 2008

A Strike in the Dark; What did Israel bomb in Syria? (The New Yorker)

...Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. "There is no security around the building," he said. "No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex."

Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction.

"All you could see was a box," Lewis said. "You couldn't see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It's just a box." ...



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