Nuclear weapons — proliferating nonsense (5)

IT is a debilitating commentary, on Black intellectual prowess, that many African political leaders joined in the praise. This purblind perception of South African policy foreshadowed the Pelindaba debacle of 1996—in which Black diplomats signed a treaty that render them strategic eunucs.

     During NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, for example, its spokesman, Jamie Shea, made a cogent observation. Quoting Frederick the Great (King of Prussia, 1740-1786), he remarked, to BBC News, that “Diplomacy without arms is like music without instruments”.

     South Africa played a leading role in establishing the Pelindaba accord and was among its earliest member states. The De Klerk government embarked on its initiative, fully aware that this travesty of a treaty would obligate African states to forever sing a cappella!

      Carey Sublette, a U.S. arms analyst, cites three reasons South Africa may have destroyed its nuclear technology, including the Cold War’s end and a desire to re-join the global community. But it may also have been a ploy, “to keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of any future black-lead government”.

     The Planet Investigations blog is more explicit, on this last point. “The white apartheid regime didn’t want a Black Nation to possess nuclear weapons,” it surmised, “a dissuasive power in our contemporary world”.

     “The whole thing,” concurred Frans Cronje, deputy Chief Executive Officer, at the South African Institute of Race Relations, a Johannesburg-based think tank, “was dressed up as an honourable retreat from a nuclear Africa”.

    Cronje, himself white, adds that “a nuclear African state would be taken more seriously and would have a stronger leadership role – it forces people to take you seriously”.   

      No one should be surprised, that many of the Western diplomats and political leaders, who applauded the trickery and deceit of De Klerk’s all-white, Boer dominated government, were from countries that had secretly helped South Africa to build its atomic bombs.

      Israel’s nuclear collaboration is well documented. Amir Oren, writing in the Israeli magazine, Haaretz, traces military cooperation to the Jewish State’s experience during the 1973 Yom Kippur War with Syria and Egypt—when the U.S.A. had to airlift arms to Israel.

     “In that era of alliance between isolated states,” he explains, “relations were built on blood, race and money. Security was what mattered — and money, lots of money, at least for one side — and to hell with [racial] segregation”.

     Israel’s main targets, he says, were Iran and the Republic of South Africa. The diplomatic triad that emerged, in the late 1950s thru ‘70s, casts a revealing light. It tends to undermine two (of the three) crucial pillars, on which both the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Pelindaba treaties rest.

     One is “non-proliferation” and the other is the right of signatories to “the peaceful use” of nuclear technology. The latter is a thinly camouflaged gimmick, for unloading the nuclear technology generated during the Manhattan Project.

     After all, weak nations cannot exercise their “rights” to the peaceful use of a technology they do not possess—they must first buy it from the nuclear powers.

     The U.S. “Atoms for Peace” programme, which President Eisenhower announced after the war, also serves as a diplomatic smoke screen, to help conceal proliferation. It enables the nuclear powers to sell sensitive dual use technology to favoured nations—while throttling others with NPT and/or Pelindaba.   

     Despite its frequent, bellicose threats to bomb Iran, for instance, Israel had exceedingly close ties to that country up to the Islamic Revolution—ties that almost certainly involved the sale of sensitive nuclear technology.

     Referring to a 2013 Israeli documentary, entitled, “Before The Revolution,” Raphael Ahren reported, in The Times of Israel, that the film “depicts a controversial framework of military and intelligence cooperation that likely included helping set up what became Tehran’s rogue nuclear program”.

    The U.S.A. too, carried dual use technology to Iran, during this period—including a research reactor and a delivery of highly enriched uranium (HEU), under the “Atoms for Peace” programme.

    In a 1974 CIA report, widely cited in the literature, the Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, allegedly admitted that he was thinking of building a nuclear bomb: And if the U.S. Department of State knew, there is no question but that Israeli intelligence was also aware.   

   To be continued.