TOO DELICATE TO TALK ABOUT'
SWEET, WILLIAM
'Too delicate to talk about' But not in South Africa William Sweet Howard Morland's controversial article on the hydrogen bomb was intended, I understand from an article by Walter Pincus in The...
...I strongly suspect, however, that the South African scientists already have the information and that the main effect of keeping it secret in the United States is to prevent the public at large from figuring out what countries like South Africa are doing...
...Why then had South Africa put such a large effort into development of enrichment technology...
...Government did nothing to interfere with South African preparations...
...I also have no idea of whether the information contained in Howard Morland's article would be useful to South African scientists in such an effort...
...There are many possible explanations...
...man enrichment technology also is far from ideal...
...Generally weapons-prone countries have favored plutonium, and this has been especially true of countries which have independent uranium reserves...
...Yet the U.S...
...During the summer of 1977 the Soviet Union accused Pretoria of preparing to test a nuclear explosive, and the Western nations including the United States joined with the U.S.S.R...
...A second-rate commercial technology and a second-rate military technology do not add up to a first-rate technology...
...On the other hand, as a means of acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, the GerWilliam Sweet is a free-lance writer who specializes in arms control and disarmament issues...
...public was told nothing, and as far as I know the U.S...
...Ipersonally have no idea of whether South Africa is developing a hydrogen bomb...
...reconnaissance satellites, the authors of The Nuclear Axis point out, had passed directly over the South African test site on six occasions during the two months preceding the alleged test...
...The technology provides South Africa with the capability of producing weapons-grade enriched uranium, suitable for use in atomic bombs...
...The more I thought about the evidence presented in The Nuclear Axis the more puzzled I became about what South Africa actually was up to...
...Unfortunately, our recent history has been full of bad intelligence developed and good intelligence ignored, and recent U.S.-South African relations provide a case in point...
...intelligence officials, just as much as their Soviet counterparts, must have known about the suspect activities at the site...
...It would have been far simpler and far cheaper for South Africa to have acquired a weapons capability in the form of a natural uranium-fueled reactor and a small reprocessing facility, the route favored by countries such as India and Argentina...
...An experience I had a few months ago persuades me, however, that there is something to Morland's point of view...
...For on the one hand, the German enrichment technology adapted by South Africa is by all accounts an uneconomic and second-rate energy technology...
...This amounted to saying that the subject was too delicate to talk about, and I was left with no means of evaluating my theory...
...If we could count on our intelligence services to develop and evaluate such theories, and if we could count on our political leaders to act on intelligence developed, then there would be no need for the layperson to know much about H-bomb construction...
...Still more to the point, an H-bomb program would seem to explain far more satisfactorily than an A-bomb program the South African enrichment effort...
...But he would only say that "there is no basis in official docu-mentable sources that enriched uranium must be used in a hydrogen bomb...
...in pressuring Pretoria to cancel the alleged test...
...In an effort to follow up on my hunch, I called Theodore Taylor, the renowned expert on technical aspects of proliferation...
...U.S...
...Certainly, inasmuch as the main point of having a bomb would be to impress the world in general and Africa in particular with South Africa's technological and military prowess, a hydrogen bomb would be far more effective than an atomic bomb...
...Why was it that the Soviet Union had to take the initiative...
...Too delicate to talk about' But not in South Africa William Sweet Howard Morland's controversial article on the hydrogen bomb was intended, I understand from an article by Walter Pincus in The Washington Post, to "take away the cloak of secrecy around the bomb's construction and thus clear the way for an open discussion of the ills of nuclear proliferation...
...Last fall I was preparing a review of The Nuclear Axis: The Secret Collaboration Between West Germany and South Africa, which tells the story of how private companies and members of government research establishments in Germany helped South Africa develop a uranium enrichment technology...
...One which struck me with some force, however, and one which has received very little attention, is that South Africa wishes to have the capability not only of building ordinary atomic bombs but also hydrogen bombs...
...Revealing technical aspects of H-bomb construction no doubt has struck many Post readers as an odd way to combat proliferation, and to a degree I share that skepticism...
...Countries wishing to develop a nuclear weapons capability either can extract plutonium from the spent fuel from a reactor, a relatively straightforward procedure, or produce highly enriched uranium, an extremely complex and expensive process...
Vol. 43 • May 1979 • No. 5
