Why did the American refusal to resupply fuel cause the closing of the reactor? Doesn't Israel possess the ability to enrich uranium as we are told by "leaks" to the press? The answer is "NO". According to our strategic agreement with the US, in return for the continued financial support Israel agreed not to enrich uranium. The activities in Dimona are research only and only involve a fixed volume of fissile material obtained in the sixties and seventies. The activities are maintained for deterrence and for the occasional "leak" or "leaker". I knew personally one of the CIA team in the eighties, a nice Jewish guy from Texas, who resided in Tel Aviv and headed the surveilance team. Even today, there is a 24 hour presence of a monitoring team in Dimona. Ask yourself, if Israel had indeed possessed the huge quantities of uranium to build 300 nukes, than it could have built and maintained several nuclear power stations and have a complete energy independence. Why didn't Israel do it? All the stories about "extracting uranium from phosphates", submarines with nuclear cruise missiles, etc. are exactly that...stories.

Just to clarify: you actually think Israel does not have the ability to acquire uranium for nukes (gee, wonder how n Korea got theirs) from outside? This plant has been in operation since BEFORE the NPT and Dimona got all of it's nuclear technology from FRANCE: which supplied AMPLE uranium for decades of use. and if you think Israel, who somehow won five wars against an onslaught of massive nations and militaries who had superior numbers and weapons, doesn't know how to build a nuke, you've lost it. Israel is by far, the most innovative nation in world history. Why every major world power for two thousand years could never make anything grow in Israel but in 60 years, Jews made the land flourish...speaks volumes about Israels capabilities. Your assessment is an absurdity. I certainly know of no other nation that can shoot down a rocket the width of a coke bottle that's traveling at hundreds of miles per hour...out of the sky. Not even the US developed such technology. Uranium is ALL OVER AFRICA: you might want to ask yourself why Israel has such good relations with so many African nations who just happen to have massive amounts of raw uranium in them...gee, let's start there, no? Shalom