When Apartheid South Africa and Israel built an Atomic Bomb Together

By Lenni Brenner

ccun.org, December 21, 2008

 

Below are excerpts from an important article on A-bomb proliferation, from the Science Times section of the 12/9 issue of that NY daily. The author discusses all such routes. While many were public, the least known transfers were from the US to France, then to Israel, and then that state's atomic collaboration with apartheid South Africa.

Documented history of the Jerusalem-Pretoria atomic alliance is important now, for four reasons.  

1 - Israeli politicians openly threaten to attack Iran if it develops the capacity to produce   an atomic bomb. 

2- According to Haaretz, a reliable Israeli journal, the incoming Obama regime will formally put Israel under America's atomic umbrella vis-à-vis Iran.  

3 - Experts estimate that Israel has 200 bombs, but there is absolutely no international inspection of those weapons. 

4 - Obama will try to take advantage of his ethnicity for imperial purposes re Africa. He claims to have done some anti-apartheid organizing in his college days, but doesn't cite even one statement he made against the then public Zionist-Apartheid alliance. 

Clearly, it is important that the information below gets the attention of the Black community. Many of the older generations of American Blacks remember that criminal association and are distrustful of Israel. Passing on this documentation will reinvigorate their anti-Zionism and simultaneously begin the necessary process of making them distrustful of Obama. Why didn't he share their opposition to Israel, then, and why is he so friendly to it now?  

For a democratic secular bi-national Palestine/Israel in a democratic secular world, 

Lenni Brenner

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William Broad, "The Hidden Travels of The Bomb," NY Times, 12/9/08:

Thomas C. Reed, a veteran of the Liverpool weapons laboratory in California and a former secretary of the Air Force and Danny B. Stillman, former director of intelligence at Los Alamos, have teamed up in "The Nuclear Express: A Political History of the Bomb and its Proliferation" to show the importance of moles, scientists with divided loyalties and - most important - the subtle and not so subtle interests of nuclear states....

It also names many conflicted scientists, including luminaries like Isidor I.

Rabi. The Nobel laureate worked on the Manhattan Project in World War II and later sat on the board of governors of the Weizmann Institute of Science, a birthplace of Israel's nuclear arms....  

A lesser pathway involves France. The book says it drew on Manhattan Project veterans and shared intimate details of its bomb program with Israel, with whom it had substantial commercial ties. By 1959, the book says, dozens of Israeli scientists "were observing and participating in" the French program of weapons design. 

The book adds that in early 1960, when France detonated its first bomb, doing so in the Algerian desert, "two nations went nuclear." And it describes how the United States turned a blind eye to Israel's own atomic developments. It adds that, in the autumn of 1966, Israel conducted a special, non-nuclear test "2,600 feet under the Negev desert." The next year it built its first bomb.  

Israel, in turn, shared its atomic secrets with South Africa. The book discloses that the two states exchanged some key ingredients for the making of atom

bombs: tritium to South Africa, uranium to Israel. And the authors agree with military experts who hold that Israel and South Africa in 1979 jointly detonated a nuclear device in the South Atlantic near Prince Edward Island, more than one thousand miles south of Cape Town. Israel needed the test, it says, to develop a neutron bomb.

 

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