Secret no more

 The Daily Star

AS the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference concludes in New York, the United States-led Western powers are focussing on West Asia, because they want Iran to freeze its nuclear activities. But inevitably, attention is riveted on Israel, the region's sole nuclear weapons-state (NWS).

Against this backdrop comes the sensational disclosure that Israel sold nuclear warheads to apartheid South Africa in 1975, and the two coordinated their military programs and strategic approaches.

This is revealed in US-based scholar Sasha Pulakow-Suransky's just-published The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, based on recently declassified "top secret" minutes of top-level bipartite meetings.

The disclosure will seriously embarrass Israel, whose intransigence against ending its illegal occupation of Palestine is increasingly isolating it internationally.

The book says South Africa's defence minister P.W. Botha asked for nuclear warheads when he met Shimon Peres, Israel's then defence minister and now its president, who agreed. They signed a wide-ranging pact on bilateral military relations, with a clause stipulating its "very existence" must remain secret.

These military relations were crucial -- Israel supplied South Africa with arms when it faced international economic-military sanctions. South Africa is believed to have made six nuclear weapons, which it destroyed before apartheid ended.

The disclosures undermine Israel's "nuclear ambiguity" policy of neither confirming nor denying nuclear weapons possession. Other sources, including Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, confirm that Israel has 200 to 300 nuclear warheads.

The book also demolishes Israel's claim that it's a "responsible" state which wouldn't use nuclear weapons even if it had them -- supposedly, unlike Iran. But a nation which helped pariah South Africa overcome richly-deserved international isolation and supplied it mass-destruction weapons cannot be "responsible."

South Africa wanted nuclear weapons as a deterrent and for potential attacks upon its neighbours -- just as Israel did, and still does.

No state in modern history has been more inhumanly discriminatory than apartheid South Africa, a rogue state. Zionist Israel is in the same league.

Pulakow-Suransky shows that Israel "formally offered to sell South Africa" nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in March 1975. Present at the talks was South African military chief R.F. Armstrong whose "top secret" memorandum detailed the missiles' benefits for South Africa -- but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.

After the 1973 Yom Kippur war, Israel was short of uranium, of which South Africa has large reserves. Israel also needed hard currency. It got both by selling conventional weapons, and by sharing nuclear know-how with South Africa and converting some of its yellowcake (mixed oxides of uranium) into weapons-grade plutonium.

The Israel-South Africa alliance was strategic. In 1987, Israel adopted some sanctions against South Africa, but continued with existing arms contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

The alliance was based less on military imperatives than on the two leaderships' shared belief that theirs were two relatively small nations guarding "their land" and "identity" in a hostile environment. Both wanted to perpetuate their privileged colonial settlers' power.

Their self-assigned role as regional bulwarks against Communism brought them Western support -- until global opinion turned against apartheid. Israel forgot that Nazi sympathisers had helped put apartheid's architects into power.

In a secret deal, South Africa lifted safeguards on 450 tonnes of yellowcake sold to Israel, in return for tritium, used as a nuclear weapons booster. Israel bailed out a South African politician whose bankruptcy would have jeopardised the deal.

This revelation proves that Israel was cynically culpable of nuclear proliferation.

Israel had clandestine dealings from the 1950s onwards with Britain and France too, which supplied it nuclear materials, including heavy water. Its nuclear weapons are undeclared -- unlike those of the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan or North Korea. Israel hasn't signed the NPT.

However, although dubious, Israel's record of clandestine nuclear collaborations, shady deals and complicity in other countries' weapons pursuits mirrors that of the other NWSs. They are all culpable of proliferation or violation of dual-use commitments.

India has had nuclear assistance from the US, UK, Canada, the USSR, China, Russia, even Norway. India built its first bomb on the basis of CIRUS, a reactor constructed with Canadian and US support.

India's 1974 explosion was called "peaceful" because India didn't want to be seen violating its professed commitment to nuclear disarmament or its "peaceful" use legal commitments to the US and Canada. It also lacked the stomach for more tests.

Pakistan has long received nuclear weapons designs, from China. A.Q. Khan, who pilfered centrifuge designs from Europe, made dirty deals with North Korea, Libya and Iran, with the Pakistani army's complicity. Washington ignored Islamabad's nuclear preparations during Afghanistan's Soviet occupation. North Korea made its bomb with a Soviet-built reactor.

The point is, all NWSs have been complicit in nuclear proliferation. Worse, they are the only nations to have used nuclear weapons and practised nuclear blackmail. So, their blackballing of Iran is hypocritical. Nuclear weapons are unacceptably dangerous in anybody's hands

Although NWSs rationalise nuclear weapons via "deterrence," they have doctrines for actually using them against non-combatant civilians. Deterrence entails the readiness to use them.

The US and USSR came close to using nuclear weapons during the Cold War; Israel in 1973; and Pakistan and India during the 1999 Kargil conflict and the 10 month-long standoff in 2001.

No government committed to exterminating millions of civilians is "responsible." The current hype about "terrorist groups" acquiring nuclear material serves to legitimise the NWSs' possession of them and to fraudulently distinguish between "responsible" and "irresponsible" actors.

"Responsible NWSs" is a contradiction in terms. The greatest nuclear danger emanates from the NWSs, which seek security through nuclear terror. Non-state actors like al-Qaeda cannot build the elaborate relatively sophisticated infrastructure that nuclear programs need. They have even failed to clandestinely buy fissile material.

Yet, so long as nuclear weapons exist and are regarded as a currency of power, state and non-state actors will be tempted to acquire them. The only way of preventing them is to eliminate nuclear weapons globally.

Praful Bidwai is an eminent Indian columnist.
Email: bidwai@bol.net.in.This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it