The history of voluntary abandonment of nuclear weapons carries many useful lessons.
The policy of the current confrontation of the whole world to the DPRK nuclear program will fail. It proves to us storyor, more precisely, the history of one country’s voluntary refusal of nuclear weapons and means of delivery. We are talking about South Africa, which was pressured by sanctions, war, and diplomatic hysterics. But in the end, the West was mistaken, as it’s wrong now.
The "ideological father" of the South African nuclear program (as well as of some other countries) can be called US President Dwight Haik Eisenhower, who spoke from the UN General Assembly 8 December 1953, with his famous speech "Atoms for Peace" (not to be confused with the Soviet post-Chernobyl acumen about the "peaceful atom in every home"). “I am forced to speak today in a language that is inherently new, which I, who have dedicated most of my life to the military profession, would prefer never to use. This new language is the language of atomic weapons, ”he said then.
That was the beginning of the American “peaceful atom” program, called “Operation Kendor” for domestic consumption. In fact, it was a large-scale propaganda campaign - one of the elements of the strategic ideological operations of the Cold War, in which all American media, educational and scientific organizations, politicians and scientists were involved. It lasted for years, and its goal was officially considered the so-called emotional regulation - maintaining in society a balance between the fear of nuclear war and the belief in the peaceful use of uranium for economic and scientific purposes. That is, at the same time it was necessary to intimidate the population with the growth of the USSR’s nuclear potential, but at the same time inspire him with the idea that "their" atomic facilities are exclusively peaceful, reliable and progressive.
During this period, the CIA convinced the White House that there was a sharp quantitative and qualitative breakthrough in the field of nuclear weapons and means of delivery in the USSR. This caused, in Eisenhower's entourage, almost panic, but the president himself, surprisingly, was under the immense influence of Robert Oppenheimer's left-wing ideas - in that period the disgraced "father of the atomic bomb." True, this did not prevent Ike from initiating promising plans for the first nuclear strike on the USSR and its allies.
Within the United States, Operation Candor was to provide the Eisenhower administration with public support in the production of atomic weapons, which required huge allocations and the construction of a large number of nuclear power plants, enrichment centers and other high-risk facilities. Almost every day in all the media then available to the Americans (print and radio prevailed) relevant shows were organized with speeches by leading politicians, including the president himself. Specialized lessons were held in schools, and specialized faculties and departments were formed in scientific and educational institutions. This campaign was one of the first nationwide propaganda "network" projects of the United States to the delight of lovers of conspiracy and political consultants.
But there were “Operation Candor” and external, equally important goals.
Most researchers agree that Eisenhower's speech was mainly aimed at the US European allies, who at that time openly panicked because of the prospect of being the first to burn in the hell of World War III. The White House then turned to the doctrine of the “American nuclear umbrella”, but at the same time promoted “peaceful” nuclear technologies among allies, both real and potential. To less feared.
Eisenhower did not go the wrong way of Khrushchev, who simply donated an atomic bomb to Maoist China, which provided migraines to all of humanity. On the contrary, he initiated what is now called the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The problem is that with the other hand (usually the left) the United States in the same period presented the most diverse countries with technologies of the "peaceful atom", sometimes with whole reactors, sometimes with tons of uranium. This is how the first nuclear reactors appeared in Iran, Israel (the famous "research center" in Dimona) and Pakistan, and they were built by one company - American Machine & Foundry (AMF).
I wonder how her leadership slept at night?
Two designs of hell
As part of the Atoms for Peace program, South Africa signed an agreement for half a century ahead with the United States in 1957 that provided for the supply of a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium fuel (HEU) to South Africa (then the Union of South Africa). The forces gathered for quite a long time, but in 1965, the Allis-Chalmers company, previously seen mainly in the production of agricultural equipment, nevertheless supplied the SAFARI-1 research reactor together with the 90% enriched nuclear fuel to South Africa. Buram, however, this did not seem enough because of the inability to produce plutonium on SAFARI-1. Local craftsmen at first screwed an accelerator to the reactor to continue uranium enrichment, and two years later they built a new line next to which they loaded 606 kg of 2% uranium fuel and 5,4 tons of heavy water, legally supplied from the same US. Molten sodium, local know-how, was used for cooling.
All this joy was placed in 30 kilometers from Pretoria’s political capital of Pretoria, near the HPP Hartbispurt, on the lands of the former Gustav Preller family farm - writer, journalist, philologist, one of the ideologists of Boer nationalism and great-grandson of the founder of the capital Martinus Pretorius. The farm (now an urban-type settlement) was called Pelindaba. From Zulu, this translates as “the end of history” (“final decision”, if you will). But then this detail did not seem ridiculous or prophetic.
In principle, South Africa began to think about its own nuclear weapons long before that. Back in 1948, the South African Atomic Energy Corporation was established, initially overseeing uranium mining. The presence of our own deposits greatly facilitated the task, and the main problem remained fuel enrichment to the level required in the production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.
The choice between uranium and plutonium is the choice between fundamentally different approaches to the design and production of nuclear weapons. The plutonium bomb is a much more sophisticated and destructive weapon, but it requires special technologies, since plutonium is more unstable. If plutonium charges are not connected quickly enough or not accurately enough, a chain reaction can begin before the maximum connection charge occurs. This will lead to an incomplete release of energy, and the bomb will turn into what is commonly called “pop” - the explosion, of course, will be powerful, but comparable to the demolition of just a large amount of conventional explosives, which is inefficient if we proceed from the price / quality ratio.
By the way, it was precisely in the “simulation” of a nuclear explosion by simply blowing up several thousand tons of TNT that the DPRK was suspected for a long time after their first underground test.
But back to South Africa. Until about 1969, they tried to enrich uranium and produce plutonium at the same time, loading both reactors at once. But for these two years even slow-moving boers were enough to understand that plutonium production is too complicated and expensive, while uranium enrichment is going quite well. The plutonium program was closed, which naturally determined the design features of the South African nuclear weapons - the production of small, so-called restraining uranium bombs using “gun” technology.
This is the easiest, by today's standards, even a blunt version, copied from the very first bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not “gun” that is because they shoot a nuclear bomb from a gun, but because one uranium briquette (“bullet”) is sent to an immovable other (“target”) in order to combine them and reach a critical mass. This is also not easy, but not as puzzling as with plutonium.
It should be understood that by the beginning of the 1970-s there were no more fundamental secrets in the design and production of atomic weapons, and such enormous costs as in the development of the “Manhattan Project” were not required. Every year the production of nuclear weapons became cheaper and more accessible, this process continues to this day. The main problem remained (and still remains) enrichment of uranium - the process itself and the technology (hence the interest in Iranian centrifuges). As for the raw materials, the uranium deposits in Namibia provided them in abundance.
This is where the thriller began.
In dangerous proximity to Osama
In 1969, a pair of South African scientists met in the British Birmingham with Pakistani nuclear research graduate student Sultan Mahmoud, who sort of worked on researching the uranium enrichment process through aerodynamic nozzles. It is believed that it was this “centrifuge for the poor” that formed the basis of the enrichment technology, which simultaneously began to be applied in Pakistan and South Africa. What is confusing is the speed with which South Africa managed to build the required equipment in Pelindaba and enrich enough uranium to collect seven bombs. The same Pakistan fumbled until 1982, until finally a uranium enrichment plant was built in Kahut.
Sultan Mahmoud is still alive, although his whole life is suspicious.
He actually worked as the director of the Pakistani “uranium project”, but rather as an ideologue and organizer, and not as a scientist and researcher. In addition, he consistently stood for the construction of gas centrifuges and was eventually removed from practical work, after which he plunged into religion and politics, went to Afghanistan, joined first the Taliban, then Al-Qaeda, heading his own organization Umma Tammir-e-Nau, an extremely left-wing Islamic persuasion.
After the 9 / 11 attacks, this amazing man was detained by Pakistani intelligence at the request of the CIA, but several months of interrogation yielded nothing. As it turned out, he did not know anything about the technology of producing nuclear weapons and, according to the agents who interrogated him, "could not have collected a single bomb." At the same time, Sultan Mahmoud confirmed that Osama bin Laden during the meeting with him was interested in nuclear technology.
This is one of the few cases when the CIA openly admitted its mistake in developing the “wrong” person. And it is unlikely that this person could share some particularly valuable knowledge with drills in 1969. However, the official history of the South African nuclear project insists precisely on this version, which is suspiciously similar to a red herring.
Over the past 25 years, several books have been published with varying degrees of credibility claims, as well as a dozen newspaper publications claiming that Israel has provided crucial assistance to South Africa.
There was no ideological content for this altruism, but later nuclear cooperation against the background of general anti-communism gave rise to a strange friendly alliance between Israel and the white South Africa (by the way, it still remains in even stranger cooperation of Israelis with extreme right-wing whites in South Africa, including terrorists - underground workers fighting for the restoration of the apartheid regime). Worse, the Boer ideology of the times of apartheid was heavily implicated in anti-Semitism, which found a practical basis in the total prevalence in the leadership of the ANC and the underground South African Communist Party of people from Eastern European immigrants. But the richest South African family - Oppenheimers, the owners of the diamond monopolist De Beers - easily found a common language with the Israelis, founding a diamond exchange in Tel Aviv. It is assumed that they could also help with military ties, although Oppenheimer Jr. disliked the apartheid regime (for complete clarity, we will clarify that the “father of the atomic bomb” is not a relative, but a namesake).
The interest of the Israelis was at the site for testing their own nuclear technologies. Blowing up a couple of megatons in a tiny state was not possible, and South Africa, with its deserts and oceans, was almost an ideal platform. In addition, the Boers had heaps of uranium enriched, but there were no rare-earth materials (tritium and deuterium) at all. As a result, in 1977, a deal was recorded in which Israel traded 50 tons of uranium for 30 grams of tritium from South Africa.
And in 1979, the so-called “Vela incident” happened - one of the most mysterious events in the twentieth century.
The Mysterious Island
The island of Bouvet in the Atlantic Ocean itself is mysterious. This is one of the most remote from land islands on the planet (to Cape Town - 2500 km, to the northern tip of Antarctica - 1700), approximately two thirds covered with glaciers. It is doubtful that even penguins live there, and you can only land on it from a helicopter - because of the height of the rocks and glaciers. No living person has ever spent a whole winter on Bouvet and is unlikely to do so voluntarily. Pirates landed Maroons there - people sentenced to death by starvation for misdemeanors incompatible with the pirate code of honor.
But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the island belongs to Norway, located strictly in a straight line at the opposite end of the globe (as a dependent territory). In 1939, the USSR tried to challenge it from the Vikings, because for some reason Oslo also claimed the neighboring island of Peter I, discovered by the expedition of Lazarev and Bellingshausen. Then both countries got carried away with completely different problems and the dispute was forgotten.
And now 22 September 1979, the American reconnaissance satellite Vela 6911, specially designed to record Soviet nuclear tests, accidentally flew over Bouvet and registered a series of light bursts characteristic of a low-power nuclear explosion - 2 – 3 kilotons. The companion was lucky - it was that rare day when it cleared up over the island. A month later, the US National Security Council issued a report in which it explicitly stated that it was testing a nuclear charge, although in the area of the Bouvet Island there was no increase in radioactivity background or seismic activity associated with a nuclear explosion.
The international community frowned towards South Africa. There was no one else. If only because only a local Canberra strategic bomber could fly there, and even then - with four refueling points. In response, the Boers shrugged their shoulders and in a Protestant way showed up to the sky. According to them, it was a meteorite, but many hinted at aliens.
The interplanetary version of the Boers was adhered to until the fall of the apartheid regime, and it was only in 1997 that the head of the South African Foreign Ministry, Aziz Pahad, indirectly admitted something like that, but was vague and unconvincing.
Subsequently, the Commodore of the South African Navy, Dieter Gephardt, who at that time commanded the country's largest naval base in Simonstown near Cape Town, became the main source of information on the “Vela incident” and on the cooperation between South Africa and Israel in the nuclear field. In the year 1994, after being released from prison, he said: “Although I did not directly participate in either preparation or performance of the operation, I accidentally learned that the outbreak was organized as part of the Israeli-South African nuclear test under the Operation Phoenix code. The blast was clear and should not have been detected. But there were not enough quick-witted, and the weather changed, so the Americans fixed it. ” That is, if the density of clouds above Bouvet Island were greater, no one would have noticed anything.
Revenge for father
The Commodore (now retired Rear Admiral) Dieter Gephardt from 1962 of the year and until his arrest in 1983, for ideological reasons, worked for the GRU of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces. He voluntarily appeared at the Soviet embassy in London, offered his services as a spy and received the pseudonym "Felix".
German by nationality (born in Berlin in 1935), he took revenge on the Boer government for his father, a Berlin architect who emigrated to South Africa during the years of economic depression and was interned in 1941 as a supporter of the NSDAP. There were many such people in the country - not only ethnic Germans sympathized with Hitler, but also many Boers, finding the theory of racial superiority of the Nordic nation attractive and in tune with their own ideas. Already in prison, Gephardt positioned himself as a fighter against apartheid, but this is still unlikely: in South Africa he belonged to the elite of society, bathed in money, held key positions in navy and at the General Staff, he lived in a neighboring house with President Peter Botha, and their wives were friends.
Twice (in 1972 and 1976), the spouses Gephardt visited the USSR, where they were fed black caviar, taken to the Bolshoi Theater and the Hermitage, entertained in Sochi and the Crimea. For 20 years of work for the Soviet military intelligence, the Commodore transferred an incredible amount of useful material to Moscow, not only for South Africa, but also for major opponents, for example, in the UK, where he at one time served as military attache. The shocked Englishmen compare Gephardt with Kim Philby, recognize his destructive power and still spit in his direction with fiery saliva.
The link with him and his wife, who received the pseudonym "Lina", all this time was carried out by an illegal intelligence officer, Colonel Vitaly Shlykov.
Spouses Gephardt was issued by the lieutenant colonel of the PGU KGB Vladimir Vetrov (“Farevell”), recruited by the French (he was later shot). In January, the Commodore was arrested by the FBI in New York City 1983, and after 11 days of interrogation under the threat of killing his wife and children, issued a communication system with the GRU. He was saved from the gallows only by the fact that not a single South African soldier was killed as a result of his activities.
Shlykov was red-handed in Switzerland, and spyware and large sums of money were found at Ruth Gephard’s mother’s home. As a result, an illegal colonel was sentenced to three years in prison, but by the efforts of the GRU he was released after 11 months, returned to the USSR and died in the year 2011, being a professor at the Higher School of Economics.
At the beginning of 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, during a personal meeting in Moscow, voiced to South African President Frederik de Klerk a request to grant amnesty to Gephardt, who was sentenced to life. This request was incorrectly formulated because of the Kremlin’s ignorance of South African reality: only ANC members, in which Gephardt was never a member, were subject to amnesty. But in the end, de Klerk simply pardoned Gephardt, and then South African Defense Minister Magnus Malan specifically stressed that this decision was directly connected with the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Russian Federation and South Africa. In retrospect, Gephardt was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral and appointed to retire. Since then, he has been rather willing to give interviews and has become, as stated above, the only source of information on the nuclear cooperation between Israel and South Africa.
True, many researchers are skeptical of information Gephardt. If he really had something on his hands, in addition to "words from hearsay", "the incident of Vela" would have long since ceased to interest ufologists. And Israeli sources categorically reject even the very idea of such cooperation with South Africa.
But seven years ago, the British The Guardian, historically specializing in South African issues, published a block of South African secret documents about a nuclear deal with Israelis in 1975. Shimon Peres accused the newspaper of “pulling quotes out of context”, but the documents point to the sale in Pretoria of the technologies and materials needed to assemble six nuclear charges. Exactly so much South Africa produced.
And what is absolutely certain is the participation of Israel in the development of means of delivering nuclear weapons for South Africa.
Atomic bombs in South Africa have always had a clear goal - Angola, as well as the Soviet and Cuban military contingents that participated in the fighting against the South African army both in Angola itself and on Caplin - the Bush near the Namibian border. Initially, those Canberra bombers were enough, but after the Soviet air defense systems were deployed to the southern regions of Angola and around Luanda as part of the Cuban expeditionary force, they became a large target. This did not prevent them from systematically destroying Soviet military advisers and translators in Kuito-Karnavale, but delivering single nuclear charges to them would be too risky. This required Pretoria to search for new media.
Soon RSA-3 and RSA-4 ballistic missiles appeared on the armament of the South African army - export versions of the Israeli Jericho and Shavit missiles. There are big doubts that these missiles (and there were no more than ten of them) with their technical characteristics could in principle carry the South African atomic bombs. It is possible that they were used exclusively for psychological pressure, and not on Cubans or Soviet advisers, but on Western countries.
At the end of the 80 of South Africa, three such missiles brought satellites to suborbital trajectories to track the movement of military equipment in Angola and on Kaplin. By inertia, the space program worked until about the 1993 year, when the money allocated for it ran out. After that, Pretoria entered the international regime of control over missile technology and allowed American observers into its territory - to observe the dismantling of the relevant infrastructure. Under its ruins and buried the secret of the Israeli-Uarovskogo cooperation in nuclear and missile technology.
The main crime of apartheid
In 1971, South African Industry Minister Carl de Wet openly announced the launch of a program of “peaceful nuclear testing in the interests of the mining industry,” referring to a similar American program. In the Kalahari Desert, they began to drill the earth and dug two nuclear mines 385 and 216 meters deep. At that time, South Africa still did not have enough enriched uranium to begin the serial assembly of nuclear charges, and the tests were planned "in cold", that is, without directly uranium charges - they had to check the detonation technology itself. The usual story is that technology develops quickly, and the accumulation of enriched weapons-grade uranium takes time.
The fact of preparing for the testing of nuclear weapons in the Kalahari, the accumulation of weapons-grade uranium and the development of ore in Namibia was established by the Soviet illegal intelligence officer Alexei Kozlov, who worked in South Africa under the guise of a German citizen - a dealer in dry cleaning equipment. He was extradited by the traitor Gordievsky, spent several years in prison in inhuman conditions and was exchanged for ten German intelligence officers arrested in the USSR and the GDR, and one South African soldier captured on Caplin.
And then something unprecedented in the entire history of the Cold War happened: The Soviet Union transferred to the USA all the data on nuclear technologies and developments in South Africa obtained from Kozlov.
The idea was risky, but the calculation was justified - the West was shocked by such a “blow from the corner”; nobody expected such a dangerous independence from the loyal South African government. It seems that by that time, both in the USA and in the UK, much more involved in African realities, they simply did not understand the motives that drove the drills.
At first, the Americans were surprised - and did not believe. However, they sent a reconnaissance aircraft, which recorded in the Kalahari test range with already almost put into the mine charges. So in August 1977 for the Republic of South Africa began a diplomatic hell that lasted almost 15 years. The United States, Great Britain, France, and Sweden, which joined them, have fallen upon Pretoria with threats of breaking off diplomatic relations. Behind them, the Soviet Union giggled, who already had no relationship with South Africa, except through a sight on Kaplin, training camps in the Crimea and near Odessa for Umkhonto and Sizva and an endless war of intelligence services. At the same time, as a pressure on Pretoria, they began to actively use the topic of human rights, bringing down the “sanctions regime” on the country - from the termination of banking activities to the disqualification of all sports teams.
In South Africa, this was not too scared (for the then government of the country, the preservation of apartheid and the creation of its own weapon systems, including nuclear, seemed like a national idea on the verge of the nation’s physical survival), but the new Industry Minister Vinand de Villiers nevertheless ordered to put off the tests and shut down the mines.
Ten years later, when the war in Kaplin turned into a slaughter and the Cubans threatened to invade the territory of Namibia, one of the mines was defiantly re-deployed, and the same Canberras were redeployed to the Fastrap airfield. But it was a diplomatic gesture rather than a military one - Pretoria bargained for more advantageous positions in negotiations with Luanda and Havana.
The lessons of the past for the present
Without conducting any officially registered testing of nuclear weapons (the “Vela incident” is not counted), South Africa produced six serial nuclear charges in (supposedly) 6 – 10 kilotons each, placed in the body of a smart remote-controlled bomb, codenamed HAMERKOP (in Afrikaans - "hammerhead"). They also began to collect the seventh, but then the war on Kaplin ended, and the process of dismantling apartheid, on the contrary, began. For trilateral (South Africa, Angola and Cuba) agreements in New York, Namibia was granted independence, and Cuban troops returned to their homeland winners.
By the way, the Minister of Defense Malan, to the last, thought that he was negotiating with the USSR, and insulted the names of Cubans “soviet's proxy”.
The elimination of nuclear weapons was called an "important step" towards the reintegration of South Africa, isolated by sanctions, into the international community, and in 1989, the nuclear program was formally curtailed, and the bombs were dismantled under the supervision of American specialists and disposed of. Two years later, South Africa signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but it was only in 1994 that the IAEA finally confirmed that there were no more nuclear weapons in South Africa, and all atomic programs were exclusively peaceful in nature.
The main factors for South Africa’s voluntary rejection of nuclear weapons was the inability to use them and the desire of the “defeated” de Klerk government to return the country from isolation by any means. And this was precisely the striving from within, in no way connected with external political circumstances.
In this story, it is noteworthy that the efforts of one or even several countries that have some kind of exclusive influence on the “unlicensed” nuclear weapons owner turned out to be insufficient to induce him to self-disarm or at least compromise. The degree of outside influence on closed countries is in principle exaggerated. Being under pressure from the West, which included serious economic sanctions, South Africa never abandoned nuclear weapons, but only camouflaged its work in this direction. Survival in the war on Kaplin, stretching from 1966, and the tough confrontation with the ANC in the country gave far more incentives than the abstract humanistic demands of the United States and Europe. And the sanctions of that time — and rather non-poor — South Africa only pinched.
Another lesson is that there is always a good friend on the planet who will give you a shoulder. For example, when the same international community imposed sanctions on Pakistan’s nuclear program, Saudi Arabia began to supply 50 thousands of tons of oil there daily for free. And no one could do anything about it - neither the CIA nor the UN. It is possible that Israel was such a “friend” for South Africa, although now, of course, it is not recognized.
South Africa’s refusal of nuclear weapons was possible only as a result of the destruction of its internal structure. What role was played by external factors in this process, including sanctions and diplomatic pressure, is a different matter. But it is absolutely certain that it is impossible to induce the abandonment of programs that seem to be vital, only by external pressure, including military. The history of the heyday and collapse of the South African nuclear project is not only the history of espionage or science, but also an instructive example of the meaninglessness of such pressure.
In hindsight in South Africa, they argue that if the US or Europe offered Pretoria back in the 70s in exchange for abandoning nuclear weapons, some alternative in ensuring border security and the state system, everything could have gone according to a different scenario.
Another thing is that there was no trust in Washington in Pretoria, and the same Oppenheimer family found it much easier to establish relations with Israel than with the Americans. Moreover, Oppenheimer Sr., during World War II, fearing a fall in prices, refused to supply the United States government with the supply of technical diamonds, for which he was entered on the banned entry lists, and De Beers’s activities in the country were curtailed as “inappropriate to antitrust laws”.
Nevertheless, the war in Angola and Kaplin was only one of the hot parts of the global cold war, which isolated South Africa waged alone. With one hand, the United States pushed Pretoria to continue this war, with the other they put pressure on the white government for humanitarian reasons. This split personality could not be brought to good, but it is not yet clear what would have happened if South Africa had held out on the front for another couple of years (for example, the Soviet contingent would be knocked out of Kuito-Carnival). Then, you see, the USSR would have collapsed, therefore, the military feeding of Angola, Cuba and the ANC would cease, and the apartheid and Bantustan regime could be reformed much more sympathetically than what happened to the flourishing country in 1990-s.
The "ideological father" of the South African nuclear program (as well as of some other countries) can be called US President Dwight Haik Eisenhower, who spoke from the UN General Assembly 8 December 1953, with his famous speech "Atoms for Peace" (not to be confused with the Soviet post-Chernobyl acumen about the "peaceful atom in every home"). “I am forced to speak today in a language that is inherently new, which I, who have dedicated most of my life to the military profession, would prefer never to use. This new language is the language of atomic weapons, ”he said then.
That was the beginning of the American “peaceful atom” program, called “Operation Kendor” for domestic consumption. In fact, it was a large-scale propaganda campaign - one of the elements of the strategic ideological operations of the Cold War, in which all American media, educational and scientific organizations, politicians and scientists were involved. It lasted for years, and its goal was officially considered the so-called emotional regulation - maintaining in society a balance between the fear of nuclear war and the belief in the peaceful use of uranium for economic and scientific purposes. That is, at the same time it was necessary to intimidate the population with the growth of the USSR’s nuclear potential, but at the same time inspire him with the idea that "their" atomic facilities are exclusively peaceful, reliable and progressive.
During this period, the CIA convinced the White House that there was a sharp quantitative and qualitative breakthrough in the field of nuclear weapons and means of delivery in the USSR. This caused, in Eisenhower's entourage, almost panic, but the president himself, surprisingly, was under the immense influence of Robert Oppenheimer's left-wing ideas - in that period the disgraced "father of the atomic bomb." True, this did not prevent Ike from initiating promising plans for the first nuclear strike on the USSR and its allies.
Within the United States, Operation Candor was to provide the Eisenhower administration with public support in the production of atomic weapons, which required huge allocations and the construction of a large number of nuclear power plants, enrichment centers and other high-risk facilities. Almost every day in all the media then available to the Americans (print and radio prevailed) relevant shows were organized with speeches by leading politicians, including the president himself. Specialized lessons were held in schools, and specialized faculties and departments were formed in scientific and educational institutions. This campaign was one of the first nationwide propaganda "network" projects of the United States to the delight of lovers of conspiracy and political consultants.
But there were “Operation Candor” and external, equally important goals.
Most researchers agree that Eisenhower's speech was mainly aimed at the US European allies, who at that time openly panicked because of the prospect of being the first to burn in the hell of World War III. The White House then turned to the doctrine of the “American nuclear umbrella”, but at the same time promoted “peaceful” nuclear technologies among allies, both real and potential. To less feared.
Eisenhower did not go the wrong way of Khrushchev, who simply donated an atomic bomb to Maoist China, which provided migraines to all of humanity. On the contrary, he initiated what is now called the nuclear non-proliferation regime. The problem is that with the other hand (usually the left) the United States in the same period presented the most diverse countries with technologies of the "peaceful atom", sometimes with whole reactors, sometimes with tons of uranium. This is how the first nuclear reactors appeared in Iran, Israel (the famous "research center" in Dimona) and Pakistan, and they were built by one company - American Machine & Foundry (AMF).
I wonder how her leadership slept at night?
Two designs of hell
As part of the Atoms for Peace program, South Africa signed an agreement for half a century ahead with the United States in 1957 that provided for the supply of a nuclear reactor and highly enriched uranium fuel (HEU) to South Africa (then the Union of South Africa). The forces gathered for quite a long time, but in 1965, the Allis-Chalmers company, previously seen mainly in the production of agricultural equipment, nevertheless supplied the SAFARI-1 research reactor together with the 90% enriched nuclear fuel to South Africa. Buram, however, this did not seem enough because of the inability to produce plutonium on SAFARI-1. Local craftsmen at first screwed an accelerator to the reactor to continue uranium enrichment, and two years later they built a new line next to which they loaded 606 kg of 2% uranium fuel and 5,4 tons of heavy water, legally supplied from the same US. Molten sodium, local know-how, was used for cooling.
All this joy was placed in 30 kilometers from Pretoria’s political capital of Pretoria, near the HPP Hartbispurt, on the lands of the former Gustav Preller family farm - writer, journalist, philologist, one of the ideologists of Boer nationalism and great-grandson of the founder of the capital Martinus Pretorius. The farm (now an urban-type settlement) was called Pelindaba. From Zulu, this translates as “the end of history” (“final decision”, if you will). But then this detail did not seem ridiculous or prophetic.
In principle, South Africa began to think about its own nuclear weapons long before that. Back in 1948, the South African Atomic Energy Corporation was established, initially overseeing uranium mining. The presence of our own deposits greatly facilitated the task, and the main problem remained fuel enrichment to the level required in the production of weapons-grade uranium or plutonium.
The choice between uranium and plutonium is the choice between fundamentally different approaches to the design and production of nuclear weapons. The plutonium bomb is a much more sophisticated and destructive weapon, but it requires special technologies, since plutonium is more unstable. If plutonium charges are not connected quickly enough or not accurately enough, a chain reaction can begin before the maximum connection charge occurs. This will lead to an incomplete release of energy, and the bomb will turn into what is commonly called “pop” - the explosion, of course, will be powerful, but comparable to the demolition of just a large amount of conventional explosives, which is inefficient if we proceed from the price / quality ratio.
By the way, it was precisely in the “simulation” of a nuclear explosion by simply blowing up several thousand tons of TNT that the DPRK was suspected for a long time after their first underground test.
But back to South Africa. Until about 1969, they tried to enrich uranium and produce plutonium at the same time, loading both reactors at once. But for these two years even slow-moving boers were enough to understand that plutonium production is too complicated and expensive, while uranium enrichment is going quite well. The plutonium program was closed, which naturally determined the design features of the South African nuclear weapons - the production of small, so-called restraining uranium bombs using “gun” technology.
This is the easiest, by today's standards, even a blunt version, copied from the very first bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not “gun” that is because they shoot a nuclear bomb from a gun, but because one uranium briquette (“bullet”) is sent to an immovable other (“target”) in order to combine them and reach a critical mass. This is also not easy, but not as puzzling as with plutonium.
It should be understood that by the beginning of the 1970-s there were no more fundamental secrets in the design and production of atomic weapons, and such enormous costs as in the development of the “Manhattan Project” were not required. Every year the production of nuclear weapons became cheaper and more accessible, this process continues to this day. The main problem remained (and still remains) enrichment of uranium - the process itself and the technology (hence the interest in Iranian centrifuges). As for the raw materials, the uranium deposits in Namibia provided them in abundance.
This is where the thriller began.
In dangerous proximity to Osama
In 1969, a pair of South African scientists met in the British Birmingham with Pakistani nuclear research graduate student Sultan Mahmoud, who sort of worked on researching the uranium enrichment process through aerodynamic nozzles. It is believed that it was this “centrifuge for the poor” that formed the basis of the enrichment technology, which simultaneously began to be applied in Pakistan and South Africa. What is confusing is the speed with which South Africa managed to build the required equipment in Pelindaba and enrich enough uranium to collect seven bombs. The same Pakistan fumbled until 1982, until finally a uranium enrichment plant was built in Kahut.
Sultan Mahmoud is still alive, although his whole life is suspicious.
He actually worked as the director of the Pakistani “uranium project”, but rather as an ideologue and organizer, and not as a scientist and researcher. In addition, he consistently stood for the construction of gas centrifuges and was eventually removed from practical work, after which he plunged into religion and politics, went to Afghanistan, joined first the Taliban, then Al-Qaeda, heading his own organization Umma Tammir-e-Nau, an extremely left-wing Islamic persuasion.
After the 9 / 11 attacks, this amazing man was detained by Pakistani intelligence at the request of the CIA, but several months of interrogation yielded nothing. As it turned out, he did not know anything about the technology of producing nuclear weapons and, according to the agents who interrogated him, "could not have collected a single bomb." At the same time, Sultan Mahmoud confirmed that Osama bin Laden during the meeting with him was interested in nuclear technology.
This is one of the few cases when the CIA openly admitted its mistake in developing the “wrong” person. And it is unlikely that this person could share some particularly valuable knowledge with drills in 1969. However, the official history of the South African nuclear project insists precisely on this version, which is suspiciously similar to a red herring.
Over the past 25 years, several books have been published with varying degrees of credibility claims, as well as a dozen newspaper publications claiming that Israel has provided crucial assistance to South Africa.
There was no ideological content for this altruism, but later nuclear cooperation against the background of general anti-communism gave rise to a strange friendly alliance between Israel and the white South Africa (by the way, it still remains in even stranger cooperation of Israelis with extreme right-wing whites in South Africa, including terrorists - underground workers fighting for the restoration of the apartheid regime). Worse, the Boer ideology of the times of apartheid was heavily implicated in anti-Semitism, which found a practical basis in the total prevalence in the leadership of the ANC and the underground South African Communist Party of people from Eastern European immigrants. But the richest South African family - Oppenheimers, the owners of the diamond monopolist De Beers - easily found a common language with the Israelis, founding a diamond exchange in Tel Aviv. It is assumed that they could also help with military ties, although Oppenheimer Jr. disliked the apartheid regime (for complete clarity, we will clarify that the “father of the atomic bomb” is not a relative, but a namesake).
The interest of the Israelis was at the site for testing their own nuclear technologies. Blowing up a couple of megatons in a tiny state was not possible, and South Africa, with its deserts and oceans, was almost an ideal platform. In addition, the Boers had heaps of uranium enriched, but there were no rare-earth materials (tritium and deuterium) at all. As a result, in 1977, a deal was recorded in which Israel traded 50 tons of uranium for 30 grams of tritium from South Africa.
And in 1979, the so-called “Vela incident” happened - one of the most mysterious events in the twentieth century.
The Mysterious Island
The island of Bouvet in the Atlantic Ocean itself is mysterious. This is one of the most remote from land islands on the planet (to Cape Town - 2500 km, to the northern tip of Antarctica - 1700), approximately two thirds covered with glaciers. It is doubtful that even penguins live there, and you can only land on it from a helicopter - because of the height of the rocks and glaciers. No living person has ever spent a whole winter on Bouvet and is unlikely to do so voluntarily. Pirates landed Maroons there - people sentenced to death by starvation for misdemeanors incompatible with the pirate code of honor.
But perhaps the most surprising thing is that the island belongs to Norway, located strictly in a straight line at the opposite end of the globe (as a dependent territory). In 1939, the USSR tried to challenge it from the Vikings, because for some reason Oslo also claimed the neighboring island of Peter I, discovered by the expedition of Lazarev and Bellingshausen. Then both countries got carried away with completely different problems and the dispute was forgotten.
And now 22 September 1979, the American reconnaissance satellite Vela 6911, specially designed to record Soviet nuclear tests, accidentally flew over Bouvet and registered a series of light bursts characteristic of a low-power nuclear explosion - 2 – 3 kilotons. The companion was lucky - it was that rare day when it cleared up over the island. A month later, the US National Security Council issued a report in which it explicitly stated that it was testing a nuclear charge, although in the area of the Bouvet Island there was no increase in radioactivity background or seismic activity associated with a nuclear explosion.
The international community frowned towards South Africa. There was no one else. If only because only a local Canberra strategic bomber could fly there, and even then - with four refueling points. In response, the Boers shrugged their shoulders and in a Protestant way showed up to the sky. According to them, it was a meteorite, but many hinted at aliens.
The interplanetary version of the Boers was adhered to until the fall of the apartheid regime, and it was only in 1997 that the head of the South African Foreign Ministry, Aziz Pahad, indirectly admitted something like that, but was vague and unconvincing.
Subsequently, the Commodore of the South African Navy, Dieter Gephardt, who at that time commanded the country's largest naval base in Simonstown near Cape Town, became the main source of information on the “Vela incident” and on the cooperation between South Africa and Israel in the nuclear field. In the year 1994, after being released from prison, he said: “Although I did not directly participate in either preparation or performance of the operation, I accidentally learned that the outbreak was organized as part of the Israeli-South African nuclear test under the Operation Phoenix code. The blast was clear and should not have been detected. But there were not enough quick-witted, and the weather changed, so the Americans fixed it. ” That is, if the density of clouds above Bouvet Island were greater, no one would have noticed anything.
Revenge for father
The Commodore (now retired Rear Admiral) Dieter Gephardt from 1962 of the year and until his arrest in 1983, for ideological reasons, worked for the GRU of the General Staff of the USSR Armed Forces. He voluntarily appeared at the Soviet embassy in London, offered his services as a spy and received the pseudonym "Felix".
German by nationality (born in Berlin in 1935), he took revenge on the Boer government for his father, a Berlin architect who emigrated to South Africa during the years of economic depression and was interned in 1941 as a supporter of the NSDAP. There were many such people in the country - not only ethnic Germans sympathized with Hitler, but also many Boers, finding the theory of racial superiority of the Nordic nation attractive and in tune with their own ideas. Already in prison, Gephardt positioned himself as a fighter against apartheid, but this is still unlikely: in South Africa he belonged to the elite of society, bathed in money, held key positions in navy and at the General Staff, he lived in a neighboring house with President Peter Botha, and their wives were friends.
Twice (in 1972 and 1976), the spouses Gephardt visited the USSR, where they were fed black caviar, taken to the Bolshoi Theater and the Hermitage, entertained in Sochi and the Crimea. For 20 years of work for the Soviet military intelligence, the Commodore transferred an incredible amount of useful material to Moscow, not only for South Africa, but also for major opponents, for example, in the UK, where he at one time served as military attache. The shocked Englishmen compare Gephardt with Kim Philby, recognize his destructive power and still spit in his direction with fiery saliva.
The link with him and his wife, who received the pseudonym "Lina", all this time was carried out by an illegal intelligence officer, Colonel Vitaly Shlykov.
Spouses Gephardt was issued by the lieutenant colonel of the PGU KGB Vladimir Vetrov (“Farevell”), recruited by the French (he was later shot). In January, the Commodore was arrested by the FBI in New York City 1983, and after 11 days of interrogation under the threat of killing his wife and children, issued a communication system with the GRU. He was saved from the gallows only by the fact that not a single South African soldier was killed as a result of his activities.
Shlykov was red-handed in Switzerland, and spyware and large sums of money were found at Ruth Gephard’s mother’s home. As a result, an illegal colonel was sentenced to three years in prison, but by the efforts of the GRU he was released after 11 months, returned to the USSR and died in the year 2011, being a professor at the Higher School of Economics.
At the beginning of 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin, during a personal meeting in Moscow, voiced to South African President Frederik de Klerk a request to grant amnesty to Gephardt, who was sentenced to life. This request was incorrectly formulated because of the Kremlin’s ignorance of South African reality: only ANC members, in which Gephardt was never a member, were subject to amnesty. But in the end, de Klerk simply pardoned Gephardt, and then South African Defense Minister Magnus Malan specifically stressed that this decision was directly connected with the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Russian Federation and South Africa. In retrospect, Gephardt was promoted to the rank of Rear Admiral and appointed to retire. Since then, he has been rather willing to give interviews and has become, as stated above, the only source of information on the nuclear cooperation between Israel and South Africa.
True, many researchers are skeptical of information Gephardt. If he really had something on his hands, in addition to "words from hearsay", "the incident of Vela" would have long since ceased to interest ufologists. And Israeli sources categorically reject even the very idea of such cooperation with South Africa.
But seven years ago, the British The Guardian, historically specializing in South African issues, published a block of South African secret documents about a nuclear deal with Israelis in 1975. Shimon Peres accused the newspaper of “pulling quotes out of context”, but the documents point to the sale in Pretoria of the technologies and materials needed to assemble six nuclear charges. Exactly so much South Africa produced.
And what is absolutely certain is the participation of Israel in the development of means of delivering nuclear weapons for South Africa.
Atomic bombs in South Africa have always had a clear goal - Angola, as well as the Soviet and Cuban military contingents that participated in the fighting against the South African army both in Angola itself and on Caplin - the Bush near the Namibian border. Initially, those Canberra bombers were enough, but after the Soviet air defense systems were deployed to the southern regions of Angola and around Luanda as part of the Cuban expeditionary force, they became a large target. This did not prevent them from systematically destroying Soviet military advisers and translators in Kuito-Karnavale, but delivering single nuclear charges to them would be too risky. This required Pretoria to search for new media.
Soon RSA-3 and RSA-4 ballistic missiles appeared on the armament of the South African army - export versions of the Israeli Jericho and Shavit missiles. There are big doubts that these missiles (and there were no more than ten of them) with their technical characteristics could in principle carry the South African atomic bombs. It is possible that they were used exclusively for psychological pressure, and not on Cubans or Soviet advisers, but on Western countries.
At the end of the 80 of South Africa, three such missiles brought satellites to suborbital trajectories to track the movement of military equipment in Angola and on Kaplin. By inertia, the space program worked until about the 1993 year, when the money allocated for it ran out. After that, Pretoria entered the international regime of control over missile technology and allowed American observers into its territory - to observe the dismantling of the relevant infrastructure. Under its ruins and buried the secret of the Israeli-Uarovskogo cooperation in nuclear and missile technology.
The main crime of apartheid
In 1971, South African Industry Minister Carl de Wet openly announced the launch of a program of “peaceful nuclear testing in the interests of the mining industry,” referring to a similar American program. In the Kalahari Desert, they began to drill the earth and dug two nuclear mines 385 and 216 meters deep. At that time, South Africa still did not have enough enriched uranium to begin the serial assembly of nuclear charges, and the tests were planned "in cold", that is, without directly uranium charges - they had to check the detonation technology itself. The usual story is that technology develops quickly, and the accumulation of enriched weapons-grade uranium takes time.
The fact of preparing for the testing of nuclear weapons in the Kalahari, the accumulation of weapons-grade uranium and the development of ore in Namibia was established by the Soviet illegal intelligence officer Alexei Kozlov, who worked in South Africa under the guise of a German citizen - a dealer in dry cleaning equipment. He was extradited by the traitor Gordievsky, spent several years in prison in inhuman conditions and was exchanged for ten German intelligence officers arrested in the USSR and the GDR, and one South African soldier captured on Caplin.
And then something unprecedented in the entire history of the Cold War happened: The Soviet Union transferred to the USA all the data on nuclear technologies and developments in South Africa obtained from Kozlov.
The idea was risky, but the calculation was justified - the West was shocked by such a “blow from the corner”; nobody expected such a dangerous independence from the loyal South African government. It seems that by that time, both in the USA and in the UK, much more involved in African realities, they simply did not understand the motives that drove the drills.
At first, the Americans were surprised - and did not believe. However, they sent a reconnaissance aircraft, which recorded in the Kalahari test range with already almost put into the mine charges. So in August 1977 for the Republic of South Africa began a diplomatic hell that lasted almost 15 years. The United States, Great Britain, France, and Sweden, which joined them, have fallen upon Pretoria with threats of breaking off diplomatic relations. Behind them, the Soviet Union giggled, who already had no relationship with South Africa, except through a sight on Kaplin, training camps in the Crimea and near Odessa for Umkhonto and Sizva and an endless war of intelligence services. At the same time, as a pressure on Pretoria, they began to actively use the topic of human rights, bringing down the “sanctions regime” on the country - from the termination of banking activities to the disqualification of all sports teams.
In South Africa, this was not too scared (for the then government of the country, the preservation of apartheid and the creation of its own weapon systems, including nuclear, seemed like a national idea on the verge of the nation’s physical survival), but the new Industry Minister Vinand de Villiers nevertheless ordered to put off the tests and shut down the mines.
Ten years later, when the war in Kaplin turned into a slaughter and the Cubans threatened to invade the territory of Namibia, one of the mines was defiantly re-deployed, and the same Canberras were redeployed to the Fastrap airfield. But it was a diplomatic gesture rather than a military one - Pretoria bargained for more advantageous positions in negotiations with Luanda and Havana.
The lessons of the past for the present
Without conducting any officially registered testing of nuclear weapons (the “Vela incident” is not counted), South Africa produced six serial nuclear charges in (supposedly) 6 – 10 kilotons each, placed in the body of a smart remote-controlled bomb, codenamed HAMERKOP (in Afrikaans - "hammerhead"). They also began to collect the seventh, but then the war on Kaplin ended, and the process of dismantling apartheid, on the contrary, began. For trilateral (South Africa, Angola and Cuba) agreements in New York, Namibia was granted independence, and Cuban troops returned to their homeland winners.
By the way, the Minister of Defense Malan, to the last, thought that he was negotiating with the USSR, and insulted the names of Cubans “soviet's proxy”.
The elimination of nuclear weapons was called an "important step" towards the reintegration of South Africa, isolated by sanctions, into the international community, and in 1989, the nuclear program was formally curtailed, and the bombs were dismantled under the supervision of American specialists and disposed of. Two years later, South Africa signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, but it was only in 1994 that the IAEA finally confirmed that there were no more nuclear weapons in South Africa, and all atomic programs were exclusively peaceful in nature.
The main factors for South Africa’s voluntary rejection of nuclear weapons was the inability to use them and the desire of the “defeated” de Klerk government to return the country from isolation by any means. And this was precisely the striving from within, in no way connected with external political circumstances.
In this story, it is noteworthy that the efforts of one or even several countries that have some kind of exclusive influence on the “unlicensed” nuclear weapons owner turned out to be insufficient to induce him to self-disarm or at least compromise. The degree of outside influence on closed countries is in principle exaggerated. Being under pressure from the West, which included serious economic sanctions, South Africa never abandoned nuclear weapons, but only camouflaged its work in this direction. Survival in the war on Kaplin, stretching from 1966, and the tough confrontation with the ANC in the country gave far more incentives than the abstract humanistic demands of the United States and Europe. And the sanctions of that time — and rather non-poor — South Africa only pinched.
Another lesson is that there is always a good friend on the planet who will give you a shoulder. For example, when the same international community imposed sanctions on Pakistan’s nuclear program, Saudi Arabia began to supply 50 thousands of tons of oil there daily for free. And no one could do anything about it - neither the CIA nor the UN. It is possible that Israel was such a “friend” for South Africa, although now, of course, it is not recognized.
South Africa’s refusal of nuclear weapons was possible only as a result of the destruction of its internal structure. What role was played by external factors in this process, including sanctions and diplomatic pressure, is a different matter. But it is absolutely certain that it is impossible to induce the abandonment of programs that seem to be vital, only by external pressure, including military. The history of the heyday and collapse of the South African nuclear project is not only the history of espionage or science, but also an instructive example of the meaninglessness of such pressure.
In hindsight in South Africa, they argue that if the US or Europe offered Pretoria back in the 70s in exchange for abandoning nuclear weapons, some alternative in ensuring border security and the state system, everything could have gone according to a different scenario.
Another thing is that there was no trust in Washington in Pretoria, and the same Oppenheimer family found it much easier to establish relations with Israel than with the Americans. Moreover, Oppenheimer Sr., during World War II, fearing a fall in prices, refused to supply the United States government with the supply of technical diamonds, for which he was entered on the banned entry lists, and De Beers’s activities in the country were curtailed as “inappropriate to antitrust laws”.
Nevertheless, the war in Angola and Kaplin was only one of the hot parts of the global cold war, which isolated South Africa waged alone. With one hand, the United States pushed Pretoria to continue this war, with the other they put pressure on the white government for humanitarian reasons. This split personality could not be brought to good, but it is not yet clear what would have happened if South Africa had held out on the front for another couple of years (for example, the Soviet contingent would be knocked out of Kuito-Carnival). Then, you see, the USSR would have collapsed, therefore, the military feeding of Angola, Cuba and the ANC would cease, and the apartheid and Bantustan regime could be reformed much more sympathetically than what happened to the flourishing country in 1990-s.
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