A Zionist-Apartheid dirty deal
Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Praful Bidwai
A Zionist-Apartheid dirty deal
As the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference concludes in New York, the western powers led by the United States are focussing on west Asia, because they want Iran to freeze its nuclear activities. But inevitably, attention is getting riveted on Israel, the region's sole nuclear weapons power.
Against this backdrop comes the sensational disclosure from the just-released book, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, that
Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to white-racist, apartheid South Africa in 1975, and the two states closely coordinated their military programmes and strategic approaches.
This expose is based on "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior South African and Israeli officials accessed by the author, US-based scholar Sasha Pulakow-Suransky. The minutes were recently declassified by the South African government, despite Israel's strong opposition. The disclosure will seriously embarrass Israel, whose intransigence against ending its illegal occupation of Palestine and halting settlements is increasingly isolating it internationally and in western public opinion.
The book says South Africa's defence minister P W Botha asked for nuclear warheads when he met Shimon Peres, Israel's defence minister and now its president, who agreed to supply them "in three sizes".
They signed a wide-ranging agreement on bilateral military relations, with a clause stipulating that its "very existence" must remain secret. The military relations were crucial. Israel generously supplied South Africa arms when it faced international economic-military sanctions. South Africa is believed to have made at least six nuclear weapons, but destroyed them before apartheid ended.
The book drives one more stake into Israel's "nuclear ambiguity" policy of neither confirming nor denying nuclear weapons possession. Independent 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 -- unlike Iran, which might well use them or transfer them to Hezbollah. But a nation which not only helped pariah apartheid South Africa overcome richly-deserved international sanctions, but also supplied it mass-destruction weapons, cannot be "responsible".
South Africa's military 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 shamelessly racist, unequal, undemocratic, and inhuman than apartheid South Africa. If that was at minimum a rogue state, Zionist Israel is in the same league. Pulakow-Suransky shows that Israeli and South African officials held crucial talks in March 1975, at which the former "formally offered to sell South Africa" some nuclear-capable Jericho missiles. Present there was South African military chief RF 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 close and strategic. In 1987, Israel adopted its own 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 their privileged colonial settlers to continue in power. Their self-assigned role as regional bulwarks against Communism brought them western support --until global opinion turned against apartheid. Israel forgot Nazi sympathisers' role in putting apartheid's architects into power.
In a secret deal, South Africa lifted safeguards on 450 tonnes of yellowcake sold to Israel, in return for Israeli supplies of tritium, a nuclear weapons booster. Israel bailed out a South African politician whose bankruptcy would have scuppered the deal. These revelations expose Israel as an ultra-cynical nation culpable of nuclear proliferation.
Yet, South Africa isn't the only country with which Israel had shady nuclear dealings. Equally implicated from the 1950s onwards were Britain and France, which clandestinely supplied it nuclear materials, including heavy water.
Israel is different from other nuclear weapons-states (NWSs). Its nuclear weapons are undeclared -- unlike those of the US, Russia, Britain, France, China, India and Pakistan (or of North Korea, which exploded a crude nuclear bomb in 2006 and another one last year). Israel, like India and Pakistan, 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 US, UK, USSR-Russia, China, India and Pakistan. They are all culpable.
India has had overt and clandestine nuclear dealings with the US, UK, Canada, the USSR, China, Russia, even Norway. India built its first bomb using CIRUS, a Canadian-designed reactor to which the US supplied heavy water. The 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 collaborated with China clandestinely, which transferred nuclear weapons designs. Dr AQ Khan also pilfered centrifuge designs and suppliers' lists from the Netherlands. The Khan network's dealings with North Korea, Libya and Iran are legend. These needed the collusion of the Pakistani military which exclusively controls the nuclear weapons programme. The US turned a blind eye to Islamabad's nuclear preparations during the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which made Pakistan a "frontline" state. Poor, technologically primitive North Korea couldn't have made its bomb without a small Soviet-built reactor.
The point is, all NWSs are guilty of either deliberate proliferation or acting in violation of their dual-use technology commitments. Worse, they are the only nations to have used nuclear weapons and practised nuclear blackmail. So, they are totally hypocritical when they single out countries like Iran. Nuclear weapons are unacceptably dangerous in everybody's hands. Although all NWSs rationalise their nuclear arsenals via "deterrence", they have doctrines for actually using nuclear weapons against unarmed civilians. Even deterrence entails that they're in a state of readiness to use them.
The US and USSR came close to doing this during the Cold War. Even Israel contemplated doing so in 1973. Pakistan and India launched nuclear preparations during the 1999 Kargil conflict, and even more dangerously, in the 10 months-long standoff in 2001.
No government that is committed to exterminating millions of non-combatant 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 and relatively sophisticated infrastructure that nuclear programmes 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, both state and non-state actors will be tempted to acquire them. The only way of preventing them is to eliminate all nuclear weapons globally.