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Iran’s strike on Dimona – Israel’s nuclear weapons research center – shows Israeli air defences are weakened

The Dissident | March 21, 2026

The War In Iran has seriously escalated in recent days with Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear enrichment facilities, and a retaliatory Iranian strike on Dimona, the Israeli city housing its secret Nuclear Weapons development centre .

Israel struck a nuclear enrichment site in Natanz, Iran, and in response, Iran struck, Dimona, in what was apparently a strike targeting the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center located just outside of the city.

For Iran, the fact that an Iranian missile was able to get through such an important strategic area means that Israel is effectively “defenseless”.

After the strike, one Iranian speaker of the parliament said:

If the Israeli regime fails to intercept the missiles in the highly protected Dimona area, it is operationally a sign of entering a new phase of the battle:

Israel’s skies are defenseless.
As a result, it seems the time has come to implement the next pre-designed plans.
Happy Nowruz to the Iranian nation.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald noted that , “Dimona is one of the most strategically important places in Israel” adding that, “If Israel can’t even intercept Iranian missiles aimed there, that is an obvious sign of the serious weakening of their air defenses”.

Indeed, Dimona is no doubt seen as a deeply strategically important place to Israel, given that it, as Middle East Eye noted , “sits near one of the most sensitive locations in Israel: the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center, long linked to Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons programme.”

Journalist Seymour Hersh in his 1991 book, “The Samson Option: Israel’s Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy”, detailed the history of Israel’s secret Nuclear program at the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center and the efforts Israel went to in order to hide the facility from then U.S. president JFK, including by creating a “false control room … at Dimona, complete with false control panels and computer-driven measuring devices that seemed to be gauging the thermal output of a twenty-four-megawatt reactor (as Israel claimed Dimona to be) in full operation” in order to “convince the (American) inspectors that no chemical reprocessing plant existed or was possible.”

Hersh added that, “One former Israeli official recalled that his job was to interpret for the American team. ‘I was part of the cover-up team. One of the engineers would start talking too much’ in front of the Americans, the official said, and he would tell him, in seemingly conversational Hebrew, ‘Listen, you mother-fucker, don’t answer that question.’ The Americans would think I was translating.’”

Hersh went on to report that, “Sometime early in 1968, Dimona finally was ordered into full-scale production and began turning out four or five warheads a year — there were more than twenty-five bombs in the arsenal by the Yom Kippur War in September 1973”.

The Israeli nuclear program was used to advance the Israeli “Samson Option” doctrine, which as journalist Kit Klarenberg described, is “if the (Israeli) entity feels sufficiently threatened, it reserves the right to carry out preemptive nuclear strikes not merely on regional adversaries, but its Western sponsors into the bargain.”

Israeli military theorist Martin van Creveld, talking about the Samson option in 2003, said, “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force” adding, “We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”

Today, “the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute included Israel in its list of nuclear-armed states in June 2025 and assessed that Israel possesses more than 80 nuclear warheads.”

Given Dimona city’s proximity to the Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Centre, and its importance to Israel’s Samson option doctrine, there is no doubt that it is viewed as a strategically important area for Israel, and the fact that an Iranian missile went through shows that Israel’s air defence has been severely weakened.

March 21, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Militarism | Iran, Israel, Zionism