Vatic Note: This is the problem when a nation does not play fair within the international community. If SA had not rejected the ownership of those nukes, who knows what Mugbe type leaders might have done by now with such power. Its literally a risk the world cannot take. As it is with Israel we are still dealing with the "Sampson Option" and the gulf is just a small sample of what that could do to us if done on a global scale. Right now, we still have not absorbed the impact, as a nation of what BP did and the serious harm to our country. Once that is realized, it will hit us hard the consequences of our silence, ignorance and the life threatening ability of these foreign corporations to destroy us with just one explosion on a strategic level. They are now acting and becoming full fledged "countries" with their own weapons of mass destruction and their own foreign policy, their own private armies now, like Blackwater, and they are being shoved down everyones throat. That is the results of too much power concentrated in the hands of too few people. Time to take that power back again, until we can get some "humans" running those companies with a sense of serious responsibility.
Editorial: Peres’ nuke offer
http://arabnews.com/opinion/editorial/article57256.ece?service=print
Published: May 24, 2010 22:05 Updated: May 24, 2010 22:05
Israeli President Shimon Peres has categorically denied that when he was defense minister in 1975, he offered to sell the South African apartheid regime nuclear warheads.
Few people, even in Israel will believe him. Further, many will read into this lie an implicit admission that the Israelis do indeed possess their own nuclear arsenal because what Peres did not say was that Israel could not offer to sell atomic bombs to South Africa because it did not have any.
Yet secret South African documents from that era show that Peres offered the white-supremacist regime a choice of small, medium or large nuclear warheads. The deal did not go ahead, apparently because the Israelis wanted too much money. It is not yet clear, however, if South Africa was provided with Israeli nuclear technology to make the six nuclear devices it finally built by 1979. These warheads were dismantled in 1991. There remains much to be learned about an unexplained explosion in the Indian Ocean in 1979, which may well have been an Israeli nuclear test carried out with the cooperation of the apartheid government.
If Israel did indeed offer to sell warheads or the technology that enabled South Africa to begin building its own weapons, then it has placed itself in exactly the same position as Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who was prepared, whether officially or unofficially is still unclear to sell his country’s nuclear know-how to other states, including, possibly, Iran and North Korea.
The Israelis were quick to denounce Khan. Yet it seems clear that they were prepared to do the very same thing. And if they could make a commercial offer to South Africa, can they also have been hawking their nuclear technology elsewhere in the world?
The irony is that while Peres on Monday protested Israel’s innocence, Tel Aviv again jailed the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu who first produced evidence in 1986 of the Israeli nuclear weapons program at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Vanunu provided a British newspaper with testimony, documents and photographs which allowed experts to calculate Israel had probably then stockpiled 200 atomic warheads. Though he had fled to the UK, Vanunu was lured to Italy and kidnapped by Mossad and taken to Israel. Found guilty of treason he spent 18 years in jail, 11 of them in solitary confinement until he was released in 2004. His re-arrest came because of an alleged breach of his parole conditions.
Washington has always refused to open the issue of Israel’s nuclear arsenal because it was seen as being defensive. “Defenseless little Israel needed the ultimate deterrent against its aggressive Arab neighbors.” Now that it has been shown that the Israelis were prepared to sell warheads, even to a particularly unpleasant racist regime, the picture has surely changed. Can the Americans still allow Israel to stay out of the non-proliferation treaty loop? Is it not right that Israel’s weasel words about its nuclear capacity should cease and the issue of its destabilizing armaments be properly addressed by the Obama administration?
© 2010 Arab News
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
Editorial: Peres’ nuke offer
http://arabnews.com/opinion/editorial/article57256.ece?service=print
Published: May 24, 2010 22:05 Updated: May 24, 2010 22:05
Israeli President Shimon Peres has categorically denied that when he was defense minister in 1975, he offered to sell the South African apartheid regime nuclear warheads.
Few people, even in Israel will believe him. Further, many will read into this lie an implicit admission that the Israelis do indeed possess their own nuclear arsenal because what Peres did not say was that Israel could not offer to sell atomic bombs to South Africa because it did not have any.
Yet secret South African documents from that era show that Peres offered the white-supremacist regime a choice of small, medium or large nuclear warheads. The deal did not go ahead, apparently because the Israelis wanted too much money. It is not yet clear, however, if South Africa was provided with Israeli nuclear technology to make the six nuclear devices it finally built by 1979. These warheads were dismantled in 1991. There remains much to be learned about an unexplained explosion in the Indian Ocean in 1979, which may well have been an Israeli nuclear test carried out with the cooperation of the apartheid government.
If Israel did indeed offer to sell warheads or the technology that enabled South Africa to begin building its own weapons, then it has placed itself in exactly the same position as Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan who was prepared, whether officially or unofficially is still unclear to sell his country’s nuclear know-how to other states, including, possibly, Iran and North Korea.
The Israelis were quick to denounce Khan. Yet it seems clear that they were prepared to do the very same thing. And if they could make a commercial offer to South Africa, can they also have been hawking their nuclear technology elsewhere in the world?
The irony is that while Peres on Monday protested Israel’s innocence, Tel Aviv again jailed the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu who first produced evidence in 1986 of the Israeli nuclear weapons program at Dimona in the Negev Desert. Vanunu provided a British newspaper with testimony, documents and photographs which allowed experts to calculate Israel had probably then stockpiled 200 atomic warheads. Though he had fled to the UK, Vanunu was lured to Italy and kidnapped by Mossad and taken to Israel. Found guilty of treason he spent 18 years in jail, 11 of them in solitary confinement until he was released in 2004. His re-arrest came because of an alleged breach of his parole conditions.
Washington has always refused to open the issue of Israel’s nuclear arsenal because it was seen as being defensive. “Defenseless little Israel needed the ultimate deterrent against its aggressive Arab neighbors.” Now that it has been shown that the Israelis were prepared to sell warheads, even to a particularly unpleasant racist regime, the picture has surely changed. Can the Americans still allow Israel to stay out of the non-proliferation treaty loop? Is it not right that Israel’s weasel words about its nuclear capacity should cease and the issue of its destabilizing armaments be properly addressed by the Obama administration?
© 2010 Arab News
The article is reproduced in accordance with Section 107 of title 17 of the Copyright Law of the United States relating to fair-use and is for the purposes of criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research.
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