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Report: S Africa's apartheid-era nukes linked to the Swiss

A government-sponsored report says neutral Switzerland played a key role in building the nuclear weapons of South Africa's former apartheid regime.

"Swiss industry got around the arms embargo that the UN had imposed on South Africa in grand style," said Peter Hug, a historian who produced one of the reports in the Swiss National Science Foundation's six-year investigation into Swiss-South African relations.

Germany was among the countries that also played a role, the University of Bern history professor said, but gave no details.

"The fissionable material needed for this originated from the uranium enrichment that South Africa had built up with technical support from Switzerland, Germany and other countries," Hug wrote in his 11-page report for the project.

South Africa built six nuclear weapons and partially assembled a seventh between the 1970s and 1993, when then-President F.W. de Klerk stood in front of Parliament to disclose the program and announce that the bombs had all been dismantled. De Klerk renounced the program that had been aimed at neighboring states opposed to apartheid and Cold War instability that was fueling the war in nearby Angola.

He said a handful of companies and a government research institute were involved in South Africa's atomic program. In 1977, one firm began to supply "highly sensitive technology" to South Africa's uranium enrichment program. The deal was for at least 100 million Swiss francs (US$78 million), he said.

"Though details are not clear, deliveries occurred via the subsidiary in South Africa," he said.

Hug said another Swiss company helped supply aluminum vacuum outlets to South Africa, which "played an important role in uranium enrichment," he said.
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