South Africa rebuffs repeated U.S. demands that it relinquish its nuclear explosives
PELINDABA, South Africa – Enough nuclear explosive to fuel a half-a-dozen bombs, each powerful enough to obliterate central Washington or most of lower Manhattan, is locked in a former silver vault at this nuclear research center near the South African capital.
Related: The break-in at Pelindaba
Technicians extracted the highly-enriched uranium from the apartheid regime’s nuclear weapons in 1990, then melted the fuel down and cast it into ingots. Over the years some of the cache has been used to make medical isotopes, but roughly 485 pounds remains, and South Africa is keeping a tight grip on it.
Related: Vulnerable nuclear states
That gives this country — which has insisted that the United States and other world powers completely destroy their nuclear arsenals – a theoretical ability to regain its former status as a nuclear-weapons state. But what really worries the United States is that the nuclear explosives here could be stolen and used by militants to commit the worst terror attack in history.
Related: Obama's 2013 letter to Zuma
Senior current and former U.S. officials say they have reason to be concerned. On a cold night in November of 2007, two teams of raiders breached the fences here at the Pelindaba research center, set in the rolling scrubland a half-hour’s drive west of Pretoria, the country's administrative capital. One group penetrated deep into the site unchallenged and broke into the site’s central alarm station. They were stopped only because a substitute watch officer summoned others.
Related: Obama's 2011 letter to Zuma
The episode remains a source of contention between Pretoria and Washington because no suspects were ever charged with the assault, and officials here have dismissed it as a minor, bungled burglary. U.S. officials and experts — backed up by a confidential South African security report — say to the contrary that the assailants appeared to know what they were doing and what they wanted: the bomb-grade uranium. They also say the raid came perilously close to succeeding.
Related: The assault on Pelindaba
The episode still spooks Washington, which as a result has waged a discreet diplomatic campaign to persuade South Africa to get rid of its large and, by U.S. reckoning, highly vulnerable stock of nuclear weapons fuel.
Related: Key findings from South Africa
But South African President Jacob Zuma, like his predecessors, has resisted the White House’s persistent entreaties and generous incentives to do so, for reasons that have partly baffled and enormously frustrated the Americans.
President Barack Obama, in a previously undisclosed private letter sent to Zuma in Aug. 2011 and inspired partly by the Pelindaba break-in, went so far as to warn Zuma that a terrorist nuclear attack would be a “global catastrophe.” He proposed that South Africa transform its nuclear explosives into a benign reactor fuel, with U.S. help.
If Zuma agreed, the White House would trumpet their deal at a 2012 summit on nuclear security in South Korea, Obama wrote, according to a copy of the letter. Together, he said, the two nations could “better protect people around the world.”
Zuma was unmoved, however, and in a letter of his own, he insisted that it needs its nuclear materials and was capable of keeping them secure. He did not accept a related appeal from Obama two years later, current and former senior U.S. officials said.
Differing points of view
There’s more to this story. Click here to read the rest at the Center for Public Integrity.
This story is part of Nuclear Waste. A look at the world’s faltering efforts to control dangerous nuclear explosives. Click here to read more stories in this investigation.
Related stories
Japan could be building an irresistible terrorist target, experts say
Obama curbs nuclear security goals as bomb-building budget grows
Nuclear Waste: How a huge U.S. nonproliferation program became a major proliferation concern
Copyright 2014 The Center for Public Integrity. This story was published by The Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.
