Operation Opera

On the afternoon of 7 June 1981 eight Israeli Air Force F-16s, escorted by six F-15s, took off from Etzion airbase in Sinai and flew low across Jordanian and Saudi airspace, the pilots speaking Saudi-accented Arabic to pass as a lost patrol. South-east of Baghdad they dived on Osirak, the reactor France had built for Saddam Hussein at the Tuwaitha nuclear center, and in less than two minutes their bombs destroyed it before it was loaded with fuel. All the planes came home. Ten Iraqi soldiers and a French engineer were killed. The pilots, led by Ze'ev Raz, included Amos Yadlin and the youngest of them, Ilan Ramon, later Israel's first astronaut.

The UN Security Council condemned the strike unanimously. Menachem Begin declared that Israel would never let an enemy sworn to its destruction acquire weapons of mass destruction, the Begin Doctrine, applied again against a reactor in Syria in 2007. Ten years later, when Saddam fired Scud missiles at Israel in the Gulf War, he had no nuclear weapon, and U.S. Defense Secretary Dick Cheney thanked Israel for the "outstanding job" it had done on the Iraqi nuclear program in 1981.