Raid on the Sun: Inside Israels Secret Campaign that Denied Saddam the Bomb

The first authorized inside account of one of the most daringand successfulmilitary operations in recent historyFrom the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So when France sold Iraq a topoftheline nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concernedespecially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weaponsgrade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb. The reactor formed the heart of a huge nuclear plant situated twelve miles from Baghdad, 1,100 kilometers from Tel Aviv. By 1981, the reactor was on the verge of becoming hot, and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew he would have to confront its deadly potential. He turned to Israeli Air Force commander General David Ivry to secretly plan a daring surgical strike on the reactora neverbeforecontemplated mission that would prove to be one of the most remarkable military operations of all time.Written with the full and exclusive cooperation of the Israeli Air Force high command, General Ivry (ret.), and all of the eight mission pilots (including Ilan Ramon, who become Israels first astronaut and perished tragically in the shuttle Columbia disaster), Raid on the Sun tells the extraordinary story of how Israel plotted the unthinkable: defying its U.S. and European allies to eliminate Iraqs nuclear threat. In the tradition of Black Hawk Down, journalist Rodger Claire recreates a gripping tale of personal sacrifice and survival, of young pilots who trained in the United States on the thennew, radically sophisticated F16 fighter bombers, then faced a nearly insurmountable challenge: how to fly the 1,000pluskilometer mission to Baghdad and back on one tank of fuel. He recounts Israeli intelligences incredible black ops to sabotage construction on the French reactor and eliminate Iraqi nuclear scientists, and he gives the reader a pilotseye view of the action on June 7, 1981, when the planes roared off a runway on the Sinai Peninsula for the first successful destruction of a nuclear reactor in history.