By IANS,
London : Secret South African documents reveal that Israel had offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing first official documentary evidence of the Jewish state’s possession of atomic weapons, a media report said Monday.
The “top secret” minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa’s then defence minister P.W. Botha asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel’s defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them “in three sizes”, the Guardian newspaper reported on its website.
The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that “the very existence of this agreement” was to remain secret.
The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence, the newspaper said.
The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa’s post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky’s request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week’s nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York.
They will also undermine Israel’s attempts to suggest that, if it has nuclear weapons, it is a “responsible” power that would not misuse them, whereas countries such as Iran cannot be trusted.
A spokeswoman for Peres Monday said the report was baseless and there was “never any negotiations” between the two countries. She did not comment on the authenticity of the documents.
South African documents show that the apartheid-era military wanted the missiles as a deterrent and for potential strikes against neighbouring states. The documents show both sides met March 31, 1975, Polakow-Suransky wrote in his book “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s secret alliance with apartheid South Africa,” to be published in the US this week.
At the talks Israeli officials “formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal”.
Among those attending the meeting was the then South African military chief of staff, Lieutenant General R.F. Armstrong. He immediately drew up a memo in which he laid out the benefits of South Africa obtaining the Jericho missiles but only if they were fitted with nuclear weapons.
But South Africa was years from being able to build atomic weapons. A little more than two months later, June 4, Peres and Botha met in Zurich. By then the Jericho project had the codename Chalet.
The top-secret minutes of the meeting record that: “Minister Botha expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available.”
The document then records: “Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes. Minister Botha expressed his appreciation and said that he would ask for advice.” The “three sizes” are believed to refer to the conventional, chemical and nuclear weapons.
However Botha did not go ahead with the deal in part because of the cost. In addition, any deal would have to have had final approval by Israel’s prime minister and it is uncertain it would have been forthcoming.
South Africa eventually built its own nuclear bombs, albeit possibly with Israeli assistance. But the collaboration on military technology only grew over the following years. South Africa also provided much of the yellowcake uranium that Israel required to develop its weapons.