South Africa refuses to give up cache of weapon-grade uranium

On 22 September 1979, South Africa and Israel conducted a secret nuclear test near the Prince Edward Islands off Antarctica. The telling “double flash” of a nuclear explosion was captured by a U.S. Vela Hotel satellite. The test was never acknowledged by either South Africa or Israel, and most of the information the United States gathered on the event remains classified.

The Obama administration sees South Africa’s highly enriched uranium inventory as a target for terrorists and thieves. “The bottom line is that South Africa has a crime problem,” said arms control expert Jon Wolfsthal, a few months before he was tasked with leading the White House’s nonproliferation policy in 2014. “They have a facility that is holding onto material that they don’t need and a political chip on their shoulder about giving up that material. That has rightly concerned the United States, which is trying to get rid of any cache of HEU (highly enriched uranium) that is still out there.”

South African officials say America’s concern with nuclear terror is an excuse to restrict the spread of peaceful and profitable nuclear technology to the developing world, adding that its nuclear fuel inventory is secure. “We are aware that there has been a concerted campaign to undermine us by turning the reported burglary into a major risk,” said Clayson Monyela, spokesperson for the country’s foreign ministry, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation. Monyela noted that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) had raised no concerns, and that “attempts by anyone to manufacture rumors and conspiracy theories laced with innuendo are rejected with the contempt they deserve.”

South Africa has used some of its nuclear fuel to build medical and industrial isotopes which generates roughly $85 million in income per year. In addition to the commercial benefit of keeping its cache of highly enriched uranium, South Africa sees its inventory as a source of pride, putting it on equal footing with other non-nuclear-weapons states which still have enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon: Germany, Japan, Canada, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belarus.

Abdul Samad Minty, who served for years as South Africa’s top nuclear policy maker and now as the country’s ambassador to United Nations agencies headquartered in Geneva, has dismissed the U.S. push to remove South Africa’s nuclear fuel and curtail the nuclear ambitions of other developing countries. “The problem is you can’t have nuclear-weapons states who feel they can have nuclear weapons and have as many as they want,” he said. On efforts by the United States to reduce global nuclear arsenals: “Yes they are reducing, not disarming,” Minty said.

In response, Gary Samore, the White House coordinator on weapons of mass destruction from 2009 to 2013, told Minty, “Nuclear disarmament is not going to happen,” adding: “It’s a fantasy. We need our weapons for our safety, and we’re not going to give them up.”

For Minty, that reasoning is unacceptable. “Now if you say you need nuclear weapons for your security, what stops another country from saying at another time, in another situation, I also need nuclear weapons for my security?” “People who smoke can’t tell someone else not to smoke,” Minty said.

Waldo Stumpf, an atomic energy official in South Africa who presided over the dismantlement of the apartheid-era bomb program, affirmed that removing of diluting the country’s highly enriched uranium “was never part of the thinking here. Not within Mr. (Frederik W.) de Klerk’s government. Not afterwards, when the ANC took over. Why would we give away a commercially valuable material that has earned a lot of foreign exchange? Why would we do that?”

South Africa intends not only to keep its current enriched uranium cache, but officials keep open the possibility of making or acquiring more. “Our international legally binding obligations . . . allow for the enrichment of uranium for peaceful purposes only, irrespective of the enrichment level,” Zuma said at the 2012 nuclear security summit in Seoul.