If you can believe the word of the State of Israel, that is the number of days that remain before Mordechai Vanunu can be released from prison for the crime of telling the world the truth about his government’s secret nuclear weapons program.

That information comes from Mordechai’s brother Asher, a Jerusalem school administrator, who said officials at Ashkelon Prison had given Vanunu an “out-date” of April 22, 2004, just five months short of completion of his 18-year sentence.

Israel once claimed that the transcript of Vanunu’s closed door trial was so sensitive it could never be made public. But a year ago, bending to public pressure, it released most of the trial record and permitted the Knesset’s first open debate on nuclear secrecy.

Then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak, seeking to shore up his right-wing support, hinted for months that Vanunu could never be safely set free because of the state secrets locked in his brain. But, bowing to world-wide pressure, his government set an official release date - albeit one that is intolerably distant.

Pressure from his supporters in America and abroad has pried open the lock on Mordechai’s isolation cell and the lock on the policy of secrecy by which his government and our own have protected Israel’s illicit production of weapons of mass destruction. Continuing pressure on the current Sharon administration can shorten Vanunu’s suffering and strengthen the cause of nuclear abolition.