Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

March 30, 2021

Thanking God for the Destruction of Iraq’s Nuclear Program

The Osirak reactor and Menachem Begin.

Forty years ago this June, Prime Minister Menachem Begin ordered the Israeli Air Force to destroy Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor. After the mission succeeded—and the pilots survived, despite unenviable odds—Begin announced publicly what had happened, hoping to send a strong deterrent message. Meir Soloveichik observes that this secular prime minister also stated that “only by the grace of God could we have succeeded in that mission.”

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