AWAITING TRIAL for treason in Israel in 1986, Mordechai Vanunu pressed his palm against the window of a police van to show cameras the message: “Hijacked in Rome, 30/9/86”. Three months earlier, Vanunu had disappeared from London, where he had been telling The Sunday Times about his work at Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. His revelation was shocking: despite its denials, he said, Israel was making nuclear weapons. Later, the world discovered the full story.

Vanunu had been lured to Italy by Mossad, beaten, drugged, and taken to Tel Aviv. This week, after 18 years in prison, he is to be released. But admirers of his stance have been angered by measures that forbid him to travel or to speak freely. Eighteen years on, he is still a traitor to some and a hero to others.

Mordechai Vanunu was born in 1954 in Marrakesh, Morocco, and his family, practising Jews, moved to Israel when he was 9. Go to Triple Cross: Israel, the Atomic Bomb, and the Man Who Spilled the Secrets (Carol Publishing Group) by Louis Toscano to learn how, by 1985, Vanunu had become disillusioned by the country. Toscano follows the mental journey that led the technician, made redundant from the Dimona plant in 1985, from radical politics in Israel to his meeting with a Sunday Times journalist in Australia.

That journalist was Peter Hounam, and in The Woman from Mossad (Vision) he recalls Vanunu’s photographic proof that the Dimona plant, ostensibly established to provide power to southern Israel, was in fact a centre for the production of nuclear weapons. Hounam is critical of every aspect of Israel’s treatment of Vanunu, from his abduction via a female “honey trap” agent to his closed trial and the terms of his incarceration, the first 11½ years of which were in solitary confinement.

Today, according to the CIA, the nuclear weapons programme that Vanunu helped to expose makes Israel the world’s fifth largest nuclear power. For the history read The Samson Option (Random House), where Seymour Hersh charts how Israel began acquiring a nuclear capability in the 1950s, using espionage and deals with South Africa and France, enlisting the help of some US administrations and deceiving others, and all the time maintaining a public silence.

Even now, Israeli nuclear weapons remain a subject clouded by political sensitivity and secrecy. In Open Secrets (Pluto) Israel Shahak argues that Israel’s nuclear policy is part of a foreign policy aimed at dominating the entire Middle East. But go to Security or Armageddon (Free Press), edited by Louis Rene Beres, for a series of essays which argue that Israel — small and potentially vulnerable in an unstable and populous region — needs a nuclear deterrent.

DAVID MATTIN