Shimon Peres Negev Nuclear Research Center

[3] Information about the facility remains highly classified and the country maintains a policy known as strategic ambiguity—refusing either to confirm or deny their possession.

[11] Estimates of the cost of construction vary; the only reliable figure is from Shimon Peres himself, who wrote in his 1995 memoir that he and David Ben-Gurion collected US$40 million, "half the price of a reactor ... [from] Israel's friends around the world.

[13] The Dimona reactor became active (critical) sometime between 1962 and 1964, and with the plutonium produced there, the Israel Defense Forces most likely had their first nuclear weapons ready before the Six-Day War.

[17] When the United States intelligence community discovered the purpose of the site in the early 1960s, the U.S. government requested that Israel agree to international inspections.

At the time the aircraft involved were thought to be Egyptian Air Force MiG-21s, although a controversial 2007 book argues that they were actually reconnaissance Soviet MiG-25s.

[21] During the same war an Israeli fighter jet, damaged in a bombing raid over Jordan, was shot down by air defenses protecting the facility after straying over it, killing the pilot, Captain Yoram Harpaz.

[23] In 1986, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at Dimona, fled to the United Kingdom and revealed to the media details of Israel's nuclear weapons program.

In 2004, as a preventive measure, Israeli authorities distributed potassium iodide tablets to thousands of residents living nearby, in case of a release of radioactive iodine-131.

[26] In January 2012, media reports indicated that the Israel Atomic Energy Commission had decided to temporarily shut down the reactor, citing the site's vulnerability to attack from Iran as the main reason for the decision.