Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center
Israeli nuclear installation
The Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center (Hebrew: קריה למחקר גרעיני – נגב ע"ש שמעון פרס, formerly the Negev Nuclear Research Center, sometimes unofficially referred to as the Dimona reactor) is an Israeli nuclear installation located in the Negev desert, about thirteen kilometers (eight miles) south-east of the city of Dimona. It is central to the Israeli nuclear weapons program. Construction began in 1958 and its heavy-water nuclear reactor became active sometime between 1962 and 1964.
Israel claims that the nuclear reactor and research facility are for general "research purposes into atomic science", but the reactor has been involved in the production of plutonium and other nuclear materials for Israel's nuclear weapons. The reactor is not a civil power plant and does not send electricity to the Israeli grid.
Israel reportedly opened Dimona to U.S. inspection in January 1965, with inspections continuing until 1969. The airspace over the Dimona facility is closed to all aircraft, and the area around it is heavily guarded and fenced off. During the Six-Day War, an Israeli missile shot down an Israeli Air Force Dassault Ouragan fighter that inadvertently flew over Dimona. In August 2018, it was renamed after the late president and prime minister of Israel Shimon Peres. In March 2026, the U.S. conducted strikes on the Natanz Nuclear Facility using bunker buster bombs to target the site during the 2026 Iran war.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center” is israeli nuclear installation. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Shimon, Peres and Negev, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1752912. VIAF identifies the subject as 310741826. Authority coordinates are 31.004, 35.147. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1958, 1962, 1964 and 1965.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.