South Africa Says It Built 6 Atom Bombs
By BILL KELLER,
Published: March 25, 1993
CAPE TOWN, March 24— During a clandestine 15-year program, South Africa built six crude atomic bombs and was at work on a seventh when it decided to dismantle its arsenal, President F. W. de Klerk said today.
Mr. de Klerk told Parliament that the program, one of the nuclear era's most closely guarded secrets, was begun in 1974 because of the apartheid Government's sense of isolation and its fear of Communist designs in the region.
After he took office in 1989, Mr. de Klerk said, the devices were destroyed, the plant for making highly enriched uranium was closed, the uranium fuel was downgraded to make it unsuitable for weapons and the blueprints were shredded.
South Africa became the first and only country to destroy its nuclear arsenal, Mr. de Klerk said, because the cold war was waning and the withdrawal of Cuban troops from nearby Angola eased the sense of menace. Other Motives Seen
In South Africa, where distrust is the legacy of apartheid, and abroad, many suspect the Government was also motivated by a desire to prevent its atomic weapons from someday falling into the hands of a black government.
In his speech to Parliament -- the first admission that South Africa had an atomic weapons program -- Mr. de Klerk said South Africa never tested the bombs, and never intended to use them. Instead, its strategy was that if South Africa came under attack, it would detonate a test device to demonstrate its ability, and threaten to use the weapon unless the United States came to its aid.
Mr. de Klerk withheld a related piece of news: under heavy pressure from the United States, the South African Cabinet agreed today to scrap its plans to build a long-range, solid-fuel rocket, according to a diplomat who was informed of the decision. Foreign Help Denied
The United States argued that the missile, ostensibly intended only for launching satellites, might have been put to military use or sold to other countries that could use it to deliver warheads.
Mr. de Klerk insisted that South Africa devised and built its bombs without help from other countries, contradicting the strongly held suspicion of many experts and diplomats that Israel collaborated in the development of South Africa's nuclear program, particularly in the effort to enrich uranium. In this view, Israel did so in exchange for supplies of South African uranium.
"I wish to emphasize that at no time did South Africa acquire nuclear weapons technology or materials from another country, nor has it provided any to any other country, or cooperated with another country in this regard," Mr. de Klerk said.
South Africa's nuclear program has long been a subject of intrigue and speculation.
South Africa signed the treaty against the spread of nuclear weapons in July 1991, and has opened its nuclear sites since then to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the treaty does not require a country to reveal what it may have done in the past, and South Africa had not done so until today. Threat to Technology Sales
Mr. de Klerk said he decided to disclose details of the weapons program to dispel suspicions that South Africa was withholding information. Such suspicions might have threatened South Africa's commercial sales of medical isotopes and non-military nuclear technology.
Although the international agency has not publicly challenged South Africa's veracity, some United States officials and international inspectors have voiced doubts about whether South Africa has fully accounted for its bomb-grade uranium.
Mr. de Klerk said today that the international agency would be given access to all sites and documents pertaining to the program, including previously undisclosed records, and an audit that accounts for "every gram" of nuclear material.
"South Africa's hands are clean and we are concealing nothing," he said, adding he hoped the action "will inspire other countries to take the same steps."
The African National Congress, which is widely expected to lead the first post-apartheid government, said today that it approved of the scrapping of South Africa's atomic weapons, but that it was skeptical of Mr. de Klerk's assertions that all the bomb-grade uranium had been eliminated.
The congress has renounced nuclear weapons and declared its support for the nonproliferation treaty. But congress officials have also said they opposed the destruction of documents that might be used by a future government to track down the full truth about the weapons program.
Government officials said it was only last weekend that the last batch of technical documents relating to the bomb program -- including minutes of meetings where important decisions were made -- were gathered up from state agencies and fed into a shredder. Program Begun by Vorster
Officials said the decision to develop atomic weapons was made by Prime Minister John Vorster at the urging of P. W. Botha, then the Defense Minister. Mr. de Klerk said knowledge of the program was restricted to a handful of top ministers; he learned of the program only after becoming the Cabinet minister for energy in the early 1980's. Mr. Botha served as Prime Minister and later President from 1978 to 1989.
The decision to build seven bombs, the minimum deemed necessary for a "credible deterrent capability," Mr. de Klerk said, was made "against the background of a Soviet expansionist threat in southern Africa" and "South Africa's relative international isolation and the fact that it could not rely on outside assistance, should it be attacked." .
Waldo Stumpff, chief executive of the Atomic Energy Corporation, said South Africa had a bomb "by the end of the 1970's" and, although it was not tested, "there was no reason to believe it would not have worked."
Mr. Stumpff declined to reveal the size of the weapons, but another official said the bombs were large crude devices with the explosive power of 20,000 tons of TNT, about the same as the bombs the United States dropped on Japan in World War II.
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bombs were designed to be dropped from British-made Buccaneer bombers. South Africa was thinking of building a nuclear-tipped missile, he said, but the explosive device was too bulky and, in any case, South Africa had not yet developed a missile. Test Site Prepared
Although South Africa sank two 500-foot concrete holes in the Kalahari desert for underground testing, Mr. de Klerk said, no test explosions took place.
In 1979 an American satellite detected a flash over the Indian Ocean that it concluded may have been an atomic test blast. Seymour M. Hersh, in a 1991 book called "The Samson Option," cited a former Israeli official as asserting that Israel and South Africa had cooperated in that test.
Asked about the episode today, Foreign Minister Roelof F. Botha denied that South Africa was involved and said the Government was never able to pin down whether it had been an atomic explosion.
Mr. de Klerk said the Government never gave any serious thought to using its device.
"The strategy was that, if the situation in southern Africa were to deteriorate seriously, a confidential indication of the deterrent capability would be given to one or more of the major powers, for example, the United States, in an attempt to persuade them to intervene," he said.
Another official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, "The thinking was, if we were attacked from the north, we would have taken one of the devices to the Kalahari and tested it -- then turned to the United States and said, 'We need you to send the Marines.' " Very Tight Security
South African officials marveled today that although more than 1,000 people worked on the atomic weapons program over the years, details of the program never leaked out.
Mr. de Klerk said the cost of the nuclear program, which he estimated at $250 million, was concealed in several budget accounts for nuclear energy development and the military.
Whenever South African officials were questioned, the standard reply was that the Government may have had the technical capability but it did not support the use of nuclear technology for military purposes.
"That reply, to my mind, is neither an admission nor a denial, and therefore it wasn't a lie," Mr. de Klerk said today.
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/03/25/world ... gewanted=1