Tue, Mar 14, 2006 page6

• Papers tell S African nuclear story

  • AP
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  Three years after South Africa's apartheid prime minister secretly put in motion a plan to develop nuclear weapons, an official of the Atomic Energy Board was heard to say: "We're going to have to make an atom bomb."

  Such candor was so rare in the undercover program that people in the CIA assigned to determine whether South Africa indeed was trying to make a bomb speculated that the comment might have been misinformation designed to throw the CIA off the track.

  "Considering South Africa's usual extreme concern for secrecy," an unidentified analyst wrote, "such direct references to nuclear weapons development may be intended specifically for US or other foreign audiences."

  The episode was reported in a 1976 document that is among a stack obtained through the US Freedom of Information Act by the independent, nongovernmental National Security Archive.

  The formerly classified cables show how two decades of obfuscation, verbal shadings and almost-but-not-quite lies kept the program largely hidden from US intelligence until South African president F.W. de Klerk announced before parliament in 1993 that he was ending it.

  That was in March. Nine months later, in December 1993, a post-case review of the South African nuclear saga raised questions about whether the government had declared all its weapons-grade uranium to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) after its accession to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991.

  "Credible but problematic" was the writer's assessment.

  Jeffrey Richelson, who compiled the documents, said they show that in major areas "the US did not have significant penetration of the South African program and did not know what they were up to."

  The South Africans announced in 1970 that they had developed a novel technique for enriching uranium, allegedly for a civilian nuclear power program. Cables from the late 1970s show that the Americans still were not certain what it was.

  South Africa's first bomb was completed around 1980.

  A 1983 document from the CIA's directorate of intelligence spoke of the discovery in 1979 of an underground nuclear test site in the Kalahari Desert and said that the resulting international uproar caused South African prime minister John Vorster "to order a halt to further nuclear weapons development. We have had no direct indication of any subsequent activities in the weapons program."

  It went on to say it was believed that South Africa "already either possesses nuclear devices or has all the components necessary to assemble such devices on very short notice."

  On July 22, 1974, a document said South Africa had only a research reactor, which was under IAEA safeguards, and "is not currently in a position to produce nuclear weapons."

  Three years later, Aug. 18, 1977, there had been a reversal to certainty that the country would make and even test a weapon, although that would be illegal since South Africa was party to the Limited Test Ban Treaty.

  The collection also cracked the door a bit on a lingering mystery involving South Africa's nuclear program and Israel, which has never admitted having nuclear arms. But the documents leave no doubt that the US government believed it did.
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