See update below.

That Israel may have offered the former apartheid regime in South Africa nuclear warheads back in the 1975 doesn’t come as a surprise. As it won’t surprise that Shimon Peres’ office says that Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons. Again arrested Israeli whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu has compared Peres with the godfather of Pakistan’s nuclear program Abdul Qadeer Khan, who had made big (illicit) business with nuclear proliferation. Vanunu who had revealed to the British press details of Israel’s clandestine nuclear program in the 1980s had been kidnapped by Israeli agents in Italy in 1986 and has spent 18 years behind bars so far. When having been nominated last year for the Nobel Peace Prize (which later President Barrack Obama received), he wrote a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo and asked for removing his name from the list since Shimon Peres, now Israel’s president, had once been a laureate (together with Yitzak Rabin and Yasser Arafat in 1994).

The then pariah state of South Africa had a nuclear program since 1969 and had actually manufactured 6 nuclear warheads.

GlobalSecurity.org writes, that “[a] flash over the Indian Ocean detected by an American satellite in September 1979 was suspected of being a nuclear test, possibly conducted by either Israel or South Africa, alone or in combination.”

The internationally completely isolated country targeted mainly hostile neighbors such as Botswana, Angola, and Zambia. As Arnold Evans writes,

“[…] There is a fundamental similarity between creating an Afrikaaner, or Dutch state, in Southern Africa and creating a homeland for largely European Jews in the Middle East. Yes, Israel and Apartheid South Africa were allies because of the similarity of their national projects created a similarity in outlook or world-view. Yes, the best solution to the dispute over Zionism is the solution that was reached over the attempt to create a politically White South African state: the rejection and failure of that attempt in favor of a single state that is not tied to ethnicity.”

 

Update May 29, 2010. See the contract here.