Iran Threatens Israel on Nuclear Reactor

Associated Press | August 17 2004

TEHRAN, Iran -- Accompanied by a warning that its missiles have the range, Iran on Tuesday said it would destroy Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor if the Jewish state were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities.

"If Israel fires a missile into the Bushehr nuclear power plant, it has to say goodbye forever to its Dimona nuclear facility, where it produces and stockpiles nuclear weapons," the deputy chief of the elite Revolutionary Guards, Brig. Gen. Mohammad Baqer Zolqadr, said in a statement.

Bushehr, a coastal town on the Persian Gulf, is the site of Iran's first nuclear reactor. Built with Russian assistance, it's due to come online in 2005.

Iran says its nuclear program is strictly for generating electricity. But Israel and the United States strongly suspect Iran is secretly building nuclear weapons.

Israel has not threatened to attack the Bushehr reactor, but it has said it will not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb. In 1981 Israeli fighters destroyed a nuclear reactor under construction outside Baghdad because it feared Iraq would acquire a nuclear weapon.

Israel has never confirmed nor denied having nuclear weapons, but it is widely believed to be a nuclear power. Its reactor at Dimona in the Negev Desert is said to be the source of plutonium for its alleged nuclear warheads.

Zolqadr did not say how Iran would attack Dimona, but the head of the Revolutionary Guards' political bureau, Yadollah Javani, said Iran would use its Shahab-3 missile.

"All the territory under the control of the Zionist regime, including its nuclear facilities, are within the range of Iran's advanced missiles," Javani said in a separate statement.

Iran announced last week it had successfully test-fired a new version of the Shahab-3, which has a range of about 810 miles. Israel is about 600 miles west of Iran.

U.S. officials say the missile, whose name means shooting star in Farsi, is based on the North Korean "No Dong" rocket. Iran says Shahab-3 is entirely Iranian-made.

With help from the United States, Israel has developed the Arrow anti-ballistic missile system. It is said to be capable of intercepting and destroying missiles at high altitudes.