Al J Venter
The United States’s most influential magazine that deals with international nuclear issues has recommended that circumstances surrounding the purported nuclear test in the southern oceans in September 1979 be examined afresh. It suggests this should be done under the auspices of President Nelson Mandela.
In a forthcoming issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, David Albright, a contributing editor and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington and Corey Gay, a policy analyst at the institute, say that there are just too many unanswered questions that continue to bedevil the issue.
There is much conjecture in Washington as to whether South Africa was honest about the amount of weapons-grade uranium it produced during the period that it was making atomic bombs. Did South Africa build, as it said it did, only seven nuclear bombs? Or were there more? More important, still, did Pretoria test its warheads in the southern oceans?
These developments follow more controversy about whether South Africa exploded one or more nuclear warheads near Marion Island.
Referring to the flash picked up by a United States Vela satellite, South African deputy foreign minister Aziz Pahad was quoted in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz last April, as saying “there was definitely a nuclear test”. He confirmed that the bomb was South African.
The Israeli reporter added: “This was the first time an official spokesman of Mandela’s government had admitted that the flash was, in fact, the result of a nuclear test, thereby contradicting declarations made by Mandela’s predecessors that South Africa had never conducted such tests.”
Then, to confuse matters, Pahad claimed that he did not, after all, make the statement.
Albright and Gay state that the US has ample reason to re-open the investigation: “Neither side in the controversy has marshalled compelling evidence for its case, leaving the issue to fester. In addition, the White House panel [which originally investigated the blast] did not study all the evidence.”