UN General Assembly
1981

19?. The Dimona facility remains without any supervision or control and is operated by the Israeli defense Ministry. The most striking fact about the Dimona reactor is that the truth about it was not disclosed until the United States Central Intelligence Agency [CIA] revealed in 1960 that the installation at Dimona, which the Americans were told by Israel was a textile factory, was in fact a nuclear reactor. Subsequently, Israel and France acknowledged this fact. The New York Times stated on 20 December 1960 that the Dimona reactor was particularly well suited for producing fissionable plutonium used in nuclear bombs. In 1969 a United States team reported that it could not guarantee that there was no weapons-related work at Dimona because it was not permitted to move about freely in the installation. Likewise, a United States Congressional inquiry into Israeli nuclear efforts complained of the lack of any detailed knowledge on the part of the United States of the purposes of research and experiments conducted at the Dimona research facility. In November 1976, 13 United States Senators on a nuclear fact finding tour of the Middle East were barred from the facility.