THE AFRIKANER BOMB

...In a 1975 dissertation on "The Power Factor in International Relations," Barnard advocated "sword-power sanctions" (swaardmagsanksie), arguing that "in world politics fragmented by sin, the sword must always be applied justifiably for the punishment of evil...

...That day may be approaching more rapidly than most whites suspect...

...As for the finding of appropriate targets, that has never seemed to be a problem for the military high commands of nuclear weapons nations...

...I put that question to the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory nuclear weapons expert whom I consulted before traveling to South Africa...

...For the better part of a day in mid-June, during my visit to Pelindaba, he practiced the art on me...

...Fuel for the first atomic bomb could have been produced as early as the summer of 1977...

...Later in the interview I mentioned as offhandedly as I could that I would be traveling to Cape Town later in the month and might like to drop by Somerset West...

...The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which designed the Vela satellite, and the Office of Naval Research, which operated it, were convinced of the validity of the sighting...

...The double light pulse it recorded at 3 a.m...

...High explosives," he replied, almost immediately...

...Many South Africans I spoke to, especially English-speaking whites, were skeptical about an Afrikaner Bomb because of what they believed to be the prohibitively high cost of its manufacture and the lack of appropriate targets for such a weapon...

...Oh, no," he replied...

...But didn't you wonder what the fuss was all about...

...I went to South Africa with no expectation that I would be able to settle the arcane Vela satellite argument...

...Vela satellite made its sighting in the South Atlantic two years later...

...even nonviolently: you cannot advocate such change, vim cannot even join an organization which advocates such change, without risking arrest, torture, and detention without trial, followed by indictment foi terrorism promotion ol communism.' nr treason, followed by trial by an all-white jury, followed by conviction, lengthy imprisonment, and possibly even death by hanging...

...Renfrew Christie, is currently serving a prison term for disseminating Atomic Energy Board seismological data and floor plans for the new Kocberg nuclear power plant, both of which are readily obtainable from public sources...

...Taking full command, she concluded the conversation: "I'm sorry, Mr...

...My prospects at Somerset West did not look good...

...the buses start tunning bumpcr-io-humpcr on the single two-lane road that takes Nowetans to their jobs in the city—to the newspapers, television stations, advertising agencies and other firms that increasingly employ blacks in while-collar positions (half (he Chicago Tribune's circulation is in Noweto and the other townships), as well as to the homes and shops and offices that offer an inexhaustible demand for menial labor All morning long, third-class commuter trains disgorge their human cargo from Noweto and the other townships into the teeming black passenger depot next to Chicago's Union Station in ihe Loop...

...A Tale of Two Cities Picture a city about the size of Chicago where half the population—the blacks-have been removed to twenty-eight townships scattered through northeastern Illinois and parts of Wisconsin...

...Botha said he did not want to say anything more about the subject...

...I arrived in South Africa on May 20, believing that the Afrikaner Bomb was in all likelihood a figment of the outside world's imagination...

...Day, we don't allow anyone into our nuclear—I mean our manufacturing—areas...

...Is there ever much excitement around here, I asked...

...It read: "This noble structure, visible from afar, serves to remind our people of a covenant made with God by our brave and pious forefathers at a time of crisis in our history...

...But a web of circumstances suggests that this key installation clearly had the capability and was the most likely candidate for the job...

...The resulting refusal of the United States and other governments to treat Pretoria's atomic weapons program as a reality Samuel H. Day Jr...

...Thus, a member of the Atomic Energy Board, Dr...

...and Soviet photoreconnaissance analysts...

...Could it be that an AECI researcher, like others for whom the H-bomb case served as introduction to The Progressive...

...They go by what their servants tell them," said Mangethe...

...The increasing desperation of the white minority government indicates a readiness to preserve control at any cost, including resort to the ultimate deterrent of nuclear weapons...

...Vice Admiral J.C...

...Every bench and every restroom in each station is carefully labeled, in two languages, whites only or nonwhites only...

...He had no apparent reason then to be sending the world a message about new South African weaponry...

...test at Alamogordo to have done so without immediate public acknowledgement, thereby demonstrating the ability of a small country to defy with impunity the nuclear nonproliferation policies of the superpowers...

...regardless of how far away it mighi be or whether you had ever lived there...

...The satellite, built specifically to detect nuclear weapons tests in the atmosphere, had never given a false report in its many years of successful operation and was believed to be in good working order...

...That is the face of apartheid...

...I asked my own Livermore Laboratory contact about this and was assured there could be no mistaking the familiar constellation of a deep, wide borehole, cables, and instrument trailers that comprise the aerial view of an underground nuclear weapons test site...

...For the United States, more knowledgeable about South Africa's nuclear weapons program than is generally supposed, there is a double incentive for maintaining the conspiracy of silence: Official acknowledgement of the facts could spur domestic and foreign opposition to America's growing economic stake in the apartheid regime...

...But then, to my dismay, the familiar voice of the manager's secretary came on the line...

...If that had been his intention, why was the matter dropped so quickly and never raised again...

...It commanded a fine view of the harbor, I noticed, but there was nothing much to see now except a flock of grazing sheep and the graceful swooping of the seagulls...

...including entry to the Atomic Fnergv Board's nuclear research center ai Pelindaba, a mountain-top retreat not far from Pretoria...

...The Evidence Here, in brief, is the evidence for existence of a South African nuclear weapons program: I* Atomic bomb fuel production...

...While combing the country's newspaper files I learned of a political meeting, hitherto unreported outside South Africa, where Prime Minister Pieter W. Botha made a veiled but unmistakable reference to the successful nuclear weapons test his government was to deny indignantly when the outside world got wind of it a month later...

...In Cape Town, I looked up Michael Acott, political correspondent for the Cape Times and Rand Daily Mail, who had written the story for both papers...

...That helped me get around...

...Was Somerset West the place where the bomb came together...

...They are anxious, but they do not perceive...

...If Somerset West was indeed the Pan-tex of South Africa's nuclear weapons program, mirroring in miniature the Texas Panhandle final assembly plant that services America's far larger effort, what route would the prototype Afrikaner Bomb have taken on its journey to the sea three years ago...

...K Were the South Africans really on the point of testing their first nuclear weapon in the Kalahari Desert in the late summer of 1977, when tell-tale signs of test preparations were picked up by Soviet and American spy satellites, or was this just an elaborate ruse on the part of the South Africans—or a misinterpretation by U.S...

...I bought a nautical map, plotted the coordinates given in the notice to mariners, and located the "prohibited area" on a peninsula jutting into Saldanha Bay, a deep-water harbor which South Africa has been developing for iron ore exports...

...Black and white look at what appears to be the same reality but their perception is almost certain to be diametrically opposed," he told a recent student meeting at the University of Stellenbosch...

...The subscription label read: A Needle in a Thousand Haystacks One of the experts I consulted before selling out on my trip to South Africa was Theodore Taylor, a Princeton physicist who designed some of the early warheads at the U.S...

...Again, there are as yet no eye-witnesses, but no other interpretation of that bizarre episode makes sense...

...That South Africa has the scientific-industrial wherewithal, the enriched uranium supply, the warhead assembly know-how, and the motivation for building and using nuclear weapons, there can be no doubt...

...where there are no jobs and where you will hope, with ihe help of a bribe to the local chief, to sign up for another hitch...

...It's like, 'Have you stopped beating your wife?' " He said the government had repeatedly spoken out on the subject, and he himself had no knowledge of any weapons program...

...Besides, the site had been photographed and analyzed independently by the Russians and Americans...

...The most obvious port of embarkation was Simonstown, site of the country's principal naval base, less than thirty miles to the south...

...But until now, the absence of evidence from the scene has left the facts shrouded in conjecture...

...satellite surveillance had pointed to that likelihood on September 22, 1979...

...No"), who split off from the ruling Nationalist Party last February and is considered by some to be a serious threat to the continued power of Prime Minister P. W. Botha, a moderate in South African terms...

...Interviews with South Africans of various races and classes reflect a general belief that the government has gone nuclear...

...That conclusion remains in dispute...

...Indeed, South African reaction to foreign allegations about clandestine nuclear weapons testing—especially the 1977 incident in the Kalahari—had appeared puzzling at the time if one assumed South Africa to be wrongly accused...

...One such nuclear weapons enthusiast, who declined my request for an interview, is Dr...

...Apartheid—the system of economic exploitation through racial discrimination which whites prefer to call "separate development"—is changing in South Africa But the changes are loo little and too late to head off what looks like an impending explosion To the white minority that controls South Africa—the Afrikaners who run the government and the English-speakers who still pull the corporate strings—the changes seem overwhelming: blacks on the mh.li'1 and rugby learns hku ks in the hais and restaurants and on the dance floors of some of the besi hotels, blacks spending money in the best white shops, blacks rubbing shoulders with whiles in the business and professional world Whites can recall a lime, not so many years ago...

...Yes, but that's as far as I can go...

...Botha indiscreetly let slip a hint of South Africa's entry into the nuclear weapons club three days after U.S...

...I'm too intelligent to get into that...

...So far so good...

...The notice, promulgated by the South African navy shortly before the September 1979 Vela sighting, established a "prohibited area" along the northwest coast of the Cape Peninsula about 100 miles north of Cape Town...

...Barnard and others for whom the nuclear button now provides additional insurance for white South Africa finds its purest expression in a pamphlet handed to me on one of my last days in South Africa as I entered Afrikaner-dom's most hallowed shrine, the Voortrekker Monument, which sits atop a hill overlooking Pretoria...

...Soon it was time to go...

...Both in thought and action they at all times relied on the Guidance of Almighty God...

...But this summer the central government dealt a near-fatal blow to Inkatha's credibility by trading some of the Zulus' ancestral territory to neighboring Swaziland...

...Barnard, in an Afrikaans journal article entitled "The Deterrent Strategy of Nuclear Weapons," borrowed heavily from the rhetoric of U.S...

...Clearly, such an order was not an everyday thing...

...A nuclear weapons designer at the U.S...

...As I gazed on the marble cenotaph forming the monument's central structure, with its inscription of Afrikanerdom's sacred pledge, ons vir jou suidafrika ("We for thee, South Africa"), it seemed to me that here was the ultimate confirmation, if any were still needed, that there is an Afrikaner Bomb...

...What distinguishes the enrichment plant from the rest of the country's nuclear industry is that 1) it is capable of furnishing the part of a fission bomb which is the most difficult to acquire—its fuel, and 2) it is not subject to international inspection...

...The company had entered a subscription to The Progressive at the beginning of 19KI and allowed it to lapse a year later...

...Their collective gut feeling for the politics of apartheid helped persuade me that South Africa's white rulers, against all logic, have harnessed the nation to a nuclear engine of death which, like the biblical Samson, may some day be commanded to pull the temple down...

...Strange," I remarked, "this is the first time I have ever looked at the Earth from the bottom up...

...But even before my arrival, my attention had been drawn to another quarter...

...The secretary told me Mr...

...Today, with its grip on neighboring Namibia fast loosening, South Africa has become the last outpost of white rule...

...Setting out one morning in a rented car on my last full day in Cape Town, I drove around the flank of Table Mountain to the city of Somerset West and parked outside the front gate of AECI's sprawling dynamite factory, from which I had been unceremoniously excluded...

...It was against company policy...

...Said Bishop Desmond Tutu, secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches: "I have no doubt there are some here who would use the bomb as a form of scorched earth policy, Their raids into Angola are evidence that they will stop at nothing...

...You arc fourhfths of the population of America...

...nuclear weapons labs, that would be reasonable grounds for suspicion, the scientist told me...

...Rousseau...

...If you are one of the hundreds of thousands of nonwhitesemployed in heavy industry in Chicago, Gary, Hammond...

...Barnard as a sign of the growing likelihood of an Afrikaner Bomb...

...And what distinguishes South Africa's racial politics of 1982 from those of earlier times is the momentum of history—not just in South Africa but on the continent as a whole...

...If they had not in fact been preparing for such a test, why did they give the assurances...

...I asked myself that question as I explored South Africa's Cape Peninsula for a week last June...

...Also, of course, at Somerset West...

...Buried at the bottom of Page 2 of the Rand Daily Mail of September 26, 1979, was a story headlined, sa could have secret weapon, hints pw...

...New evidence suggests Prime Minister P.W...

...For South Africa, the Bomb has been laid away for later use as a deterrent in case pressure for majority rule, particularly from the newly independent black states on its northern border, becomes unbearable...

...There soon proved to be limits to this cooperation, but the government's "seal of approval" helped get me going and may ultimately have proved to be the insurance for my safe return...

...You have abandoned South Africa...

...Most of those with whom I raised the topic said they assume the government was at work on a bomb...

...We didn't know—they wouldn't show us any photographs...

...He said I would have to ask Sole about that, but he could assure me there had been no plans for testing a "peaceful nuclear explosion," the characterization India gave to its surprise nuclear test in 1974...

...Tight-lipped as is the country's nuclear elite and Orwellian as is its political surveillance system, I operated no less freely as a foreign prowler through South Africa's shadowy nuclear weapons world than I have in a decade of investigation in the labyrinthine nuclear weapons empire of my own country...

...of people who were willing to risk their material possessions as also their very lives and frequently to lose both, for the sake of freedom and independence...

...In fifty days in South Africa this spring and summer, I met few whites, English-or Afrikaans-speaking, who were prepared to push their government harder or faster in the direction of a more egalitarian society...

...intelligence agencies maintain, or could it have been a freak collision of the satellite and a tiny meteor, as a White House commission eventually concluded...

...I asked the Atomic Energy Board's public relations director why this was so, and he replied that secrecy "is a real mania with these people...

...I asked him what he thought about a remark made by Donald Sole, South Africa's former ambassador to Washington, to the Christian Science Monitor last December, that "we were going to test something, but not a weapon...

...At the first opportunity I steered the conversation to explosives...

...has veiled the growing danger of worldwide nuclear weapons proliferation, dulling public sensitivity to a threat no less dangerous than the uncontrolled arms race between the superpowers themselves...

...Again, no hard evidence, but circumstances point to Saldanha, an out-of-the-way fishing port 100 miles north of Cape Town, as the embarkation point for testing South Africa's first nuclear weapon, over the South Atlantic, in September 1979...

...They seemed undaunted by the massive firepower and the counterinsurgency system South Africa has erected to beat back just such an attempt, the militarized infrastructure that has turned the country into a virtual police state...

...As the object clattered to the floor I realized for the first time that it was a magnifying glass and that it had been focused on a spot in the Atlantic Ocean between South Africa and Antarctica...

...S.H.D...

...He and others in the atomic energy program clung to their assertions that Valindaba's secret enrichment processes were too vulnerable to risk compromising through international inspection...

...Robert Mugabe's electoral triumph in 1980 after years of guerrilla war in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, where white South Africa's economic and psychological investment ran deep, was an abiding shock...

...Fascinated, I read on: "The Prime Minister, Mr...

...For years, close observers of South Africa have asked three questions: II Does the closed world of South Africa's highly sophisticated nuclear industry harbor a weapons assembly system that has already produced its first nuclear warheads, or does South Africa have some other reason for giving that impression...

...a chemistry professor at Durban and former radio chemist with the South African Council on Scientific and Industrial Research, attracted attention in South Africa with his conjecture that the blast came from a Soviet missile that had been lost on the ocean floor...

...Where did AECI do its explosives research and testing...

...his throwing down the gauntlet to Afrikaner conservatives within his own party...

...A United Nations study commissioned at the end of 1979, citing production capacity figures furnished by the Atomic Energy Board itself, estimated that with adaptation of its machinery for90 percent enrichment, the Valindaba plant could have produced enough weapons-grade fuel for one or two atomic bombs by the time of the suspected Kalahari test preparations in August 1977 and for at least eight or nine by the time the U.S...

...If I should find signs of frequent high explosives testing at South Africa's nuclear research center, as there is at the U.S...

...For South Africans, black and white, its existence imparts a terrible new dimension of death and destruction to a future that already holds the certain prospect of violence and bloodshed...

...2* Kalahari Desert bomb testing episode...

...What the future holds for our country will, ultimately, be determined by how Afrikaners and blacks relate to one another, simply because the one group is dominant in white society which currently enjoys overwhelming political, economic, and social power, whereas the other has an unassailable ascendancy in population numbers which give it a tremendous potential for playing a decisive role in the unfolding history of our land...

...Two weeks later in Cape Town, after much mulling of strategy, I decided to take the direct approach to AECI...

...There is no way that the bulk of the blacks will be persuaded to regard their sons, husbands, and relatives on the other side of the border as terrorists, whatever the law may say and no matter how much whites may fulminate...

...After fulfilling your one-year lahoi contract you will be shipped back to your "homeland...

...What made matters worse were the occasional well-publicized pronouncements of South African politicians who departed from the government's official position that enrichment was strictly for peaceful purposes...

...3* Mysterious flash in the South Atlantic...

...I telephoned the AECI operator, got through to the library, and spoke with a woman who identified herself as the librarian...

...If this had been an elaborate hoax designed to impress the outside world with South Africa's nuclear weapons prowess, a sort of nuclear Potemkin village, the ruse had certainly left egg on the face of its perpetrators...

...Besides, South Africa claimed to have developed a cheaper and more efficient way of enriching uranium which might cut the country in on a major share of what was then, in the halcyon days of nuclear power, a lucrative world market...

...My investigation established no hard evidence that it was...

...S'our papers identify vou as a Tupelo-Mississippian.an Annision-Alubamian, a Monroc-Louisianan...

...H Soweto and other black townships are being offered home rule and the hope of eventually becoming "city-states"—a move that departs significantly from an earlier fixed policy that relegated the rights of all black South Africans to distant rural "homelands...

...South African nuclear officials are still unable to give a credible explanation for the bizarre events of August 1977...

...Surveying the scene for a moment, I turned around and headed north toward Saldanha, following a route that took me past the lush vineyards of the Eerste River Valley, the gabled buildings and oak-lined avenues of the 300-year-old university town of Stellenbosch, the glistening mountaintop Taalmonument built by Afrikaners as a tribute to their Afrikaans language, and into the dry rangelands that lead eventually to the barren and windswept Atlantic coast...

...Valindaba's pilot plant went into production in April 1975, at a time when South Africa's Angolan expeditionary force was in retreat—betrayed, in the estimation of their government, by President Ford's failure to make good on CIA promises of military support...

...On chilly mornings the air is thick with yellow-brown smoke from thousands upon thousands of coal stoves, ihe only source of heal for seven Nowctuns out of ten...

...Both had persuaded themselves that violence is the only policy that makes sense for black South Africans—the only tactic that will force concessions from a central government bent on perpetuating its control, that will attract the sympathetic attention of the outside world, that will hasten the revolution that now seems inevitable to them...

...At Modderfontein, they replied...

...it would also expose the Government's nuclear nonproliferation policy to be the sham it has become...

...Taylor told me "Why don't you just ask ihem the question point blank—and then look at the expression in their eyes...

...When I was a boy growing up in Johannesburg in the 1930s, only one blackruled country—tiny Liberia on the far-off northwest coast—disturbed a pattern of white European domination that ran the length and breadth of Africa...

...But it is safe to say that it is very close to official policy, if not identical with it...

...As he moved away, I saw him casually brush off a transparent plastic fixture that had been fastened to the globe...

...This report was financed in part by the Fund for Investigative Journalism, Washington, D.C...

...I wondered whether the explanation might have something to do with the worldwide puhhcii) which attended the Federal Government's suppression of a 1479 article in The Progressive about hydrogen bomb secrecy...

...I circled the perimeter of the closely guarded uranium enrichment plant near Pretoria which, in the spring of 1975, began producing fuel for South Africa's first atomic bomb...

...I asked several South Africans if such figures were not reasonable cause for suspicion in the West...

...Valindaba did not initially arouse great concern when Prime Minister John Vorster announced its construction twelve years ago...

...You cannot own real estate anywhere in America outside your "homeland...

...At about 3 a.m...

...4. Fabrication of the warhead...

...6* Motivation...

...Dr...

...J. Van R. Smit...

...reconnaissance satellite in September 1979 hard evidence of a nuclear test, as some U.S...

...I tried to catch Newby-Fraser's eye, but he was looking the other way and talking about something else...

...my discovery of Prime Minister Botha's hint of a new secret weapon, three days after the event, adds to the plausibility of that case...

...What vias this American monthly political magazine doing in the research library of an explosives factory ten thousand miles away11 resolved to find out when I reached South Africa...

...I'm not a politician—just a scientist trying to do my job...

...South African time on September 22, 1979, was uniquely characteristic of a nuclear detonation, in which the initial burst of light is momentarily dimmed by a blast wave...

...In preparing for the trip I had asked for a list of the The Progressive's current and recent subscribers in South Africa, of whom there turned out to be only four...

...One of South Africa's best-known blacks who is not yet jailed or discredited, Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu, secretary-general of the South African Council of Churches, whom I visited in his Johannesburg headquarters, sees those such as himself who still speak of the possibility of peaceful change as a rapidly dwindling minority...

...You cannoi try to change the system...

...Barnard's proposal for clear notification of a nuclear weapons capability will become announced policy or not is impossible to tell," they wrote...

...Barnard makes no bones about wanting South Africa to arm itself with nuclear weapons...

...A. P. Treurnicht (nicknamed "Dr...

...5* Embarkation point for the first nuclear test...

...reneging, in the mid-1970s, on contracts to supply enriched uranium for the Pelindaba research center's SAFARI-1 research reactor, built with U.S...

...is a contributing editor of The Progressive, former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a free-lance author and lecturer based in Madison, Wisconsin...

...The defiant righteousness of Dr...

...Typical was the response of R.L...

...For seven years, South Africa has been operating an uninspected uranium enrichment plant at Valindaba, near Pretoria...

...I couldn't have used the information anyway...

...The exodus of the Portuguese colonials from Angola and Mozambique in the mid-1970s brought black Africa's revolution to white South Africa's doorstep...

...I pleaded some more, and she told me to call back two days later, when the manager would be in...

...they indicated they had made it their business not to know about such things...

...Kenosha, or some other nearby factory town, you are apt to live not in a township but in a males-only barracks, or "hostel...

...his epochal announcement that night that the government was prepared to consider changes in one of apartheid's most inviolable strictures—the Mixed Marriage and Immorality Acts, which proscribe sex or marriage across the color line...

...At Saldanha I found an ore dock leading into the bay, a busy fishing port and dock-side cannery, a sleepy little tourist town, and a small naval base with an adjacent military training center...

...I found no one in South Africa who would admit to witnessing it...

...It was also a clarion call to black South Africa...

...In the office of Wynand dc Villiers...

...The blacks no longer see any point in it...

...The gate was a thicket of guards and barricades...

...The Librarian AEC1 Ltd Somerset West Factory Dynamite Factory 712(1 So Africa AECI...

...f Was the sighting of a unique double flash over South Atlantic waters in the general vicinity of South Africa by a U.S...

...It was built in utmost secrecy by a scientific-industrial establishment which, like those of other technically advanced nations, has long had the potential to produce nuclear weapons...

...What amazed them was the inability of white South Africans to sense the mood of the blacks who surround them...

...When the French joined the cry, the South Africans responded with howls of injured innocence...

...The problem was that a plant capable of enriching uranium's fissionable isotope...

...But fortuitous circumstances helped me gel into South Africa in the first place, enabling me to start digging into a highly sensitive Mihjecl without at trading undue suspicion from the authorities...

...The plant reached fuel-making capacity in March 1977, after the bloody Soweto uprising of black schoolchildren and the advent of President Carter's human rights policy had put U.S.-South African relations in the deep freeze...

...Was South Africa preparing for a nuclear weapons test in the Kalahari Desert in August 1977 when the outside world discovered it and blew the whistle...

...Curious, I checked other issues of Shipping News and found that this was the only prohibition of its kind declared anywhere in South Africa during 1979...

...He told the Cape National Party congress that South Africa had, and could produce, sufficient arms to counter terrorism effectively insofar as this could be done militarily...

...A. Visser, in the mid-1970s publicly advocated development of a nuclear arsenal for use against "loudmouthed Afro-Asiatic states," and Vorster himself told a Newsweek interviewer in 1976, "We are only interested in the peaceful applications of nuclear power...

...Later, when I talked to the former ambassador, he told me what he had told the Monitor was as far as he was prepared to go...

...I left on July 8, convinced that I had been wrong...

...Months later, the pledge was publicly called into question by the prime minister in an ABC News interview in which he denied a White House claim that he had made any such assurance to President Carter...

...They were convinced that numbers—and the utter dependency of the white social and economic system on black labor—were on their side...

...A more plausible explanation, it seemed to me, was that in his exuberance over the news that South Africa's entry into the nuclear weapons club had finally been accomplished three days earlier, he indiscreetly let slip a hint...

...Indiana, and Michigan The biggest of the townships—let's call it Noweto because it's on the northwest edge of the metropolis, about where O'Harc International Airport would be—is more populous than Chicago itself, although it occupies less than one-tenth the area...

...As I was leaving, I turned to him and said: "By the way, I happened to notice in a magazine the other day that around three years ago the navy declared a prohibited area around here...

...If you were going to a foreign country to find out if a peaceful nuclear research effort harbored a secret nuclear weapons program, what signs would you look for...

...They expressed surprise and said they doubted the visit would be worth my time...

...But my attention had been drawn to a smaller, less conspicuous port a somewhat greater distance away...

...My conclusion that the existence of an Afrikaner Bomb can no longer be seriously doubted is likely to be disputed by officials in both South Africa and the United States who have reasons for perpetuating the uncertainty...

...For others—and for Americans especially—the Afrikaner Bomb is another sobering step in a global journey of death and destruction, a journey that we initiated, that we have hastened, that we have popularized, that we have made respectable for white South Africa, and that we—perhaps only we—have the power to reverse...

...Yes," he replied, coolly taking the globe from my grasp...

...The "homelands" set aside for you comprise 13.7 per cent—the poorest 13.7 per cent—of the land mass of the United States...

...Blacks, who constitute four-fifths of South Africa's population, seem in no doubt about whether there is an Afrikaner Bomb...

...There were the usual indignant South African denials and the floating of conflicting theories...

...What gave the news account its significance were, of course, the timing and the circumstances...

...I started to dig more deeply into the goings on at Somerset West but was afraid of arousing undue suspicion, so I backed off...

...1 watched his muscles tighten visibly when 1 asked about the Kalahari bomb test, then relax when we moved to other topics...

...No hard evidence, but suspicious circumstances point to the Somerset West factory of African Explosives & Chemical Industries (AECI) Ltd., near Cape Town, as final assembly point for the South African atomic bomb...

...From the very outset of the investigation, my attention focused on Valindaba, the supersecret uranium enrichment facility which is at the root of international concern over South Africa's nuclear weapons production capability...

...An old ammunition dump," said Louis Louw, an editor of Cape Town's Die Burger, who claimed to have excellent contacts in the South African Defense Forces...

...I soon discovered, stood for African Explosives* Chemical Industries—the world's largest manufacturer of explosives...

...For now, South Africa is anxious that its improved relations with conservative Western regimes, particularly the Reagan Administration in the United States, not be jeopardized by renewed public concern over its nuclear trigger-finger...

...It was in search of signs pointing one way or another that I embarked five months ago on an investigation for The Progressive that culminated this spring and summer in a fifty-day fact-finding trip that took me the length and breadth of South Africa...

...My background as an American who had spent his childhood in South Africa (as the son of a diplomat stationed in Johannesburg) opened doors that might have remained closed to other foreign journalists...

...Was there, in fact, a successful nuclear weapons test on September 22, 1979, and was South Africa responsible for it...

...There is no way the blacks as a whole will regard the white boy on the border as a hero defending them from the total onslaught...

...I left South Africa feeling that a decisive struggle between overwhelming power and overwhelming numbers is about to be joined...

...Today some downtown sections of the republic's biggest city arc peopled largely—if illegally—by blacks...

...Now we were getting somewhere, I thought...

...They pointed out that Valindaba had already proved its worth by providing replacement fuel for SAFARI—a feat of double significance given SAFARI's reliance on fuel enriched to 45percent, affording ample proof of Valindaba's ability to enhance substantially its enrichment ratio...

...Lawrence Livermore Laboratory told me that if you can get the ratio up to 45 per cent, the additional 45 per cent required for weapons-grade fuel is relatively easy to produce...

...If not, I should look for another place where lots of blasting goes on, such as a mine, which might mask a high-explosives testing program for nuclear weapons...

...Thus, it was a surprise to me, while poring over old newspaper files in the basement of the Johannesburg public library, to come upon an item from the Vela satellite period I had not previously encountered in the Western press...

...Everything except Antarctica, Australia, and a little bit of South America...

...Acott shrugged: "Of course I thought of the connection, but what would have been the point...

...Browsing one morning among the periodicals in the Cape Town public library, in search of signs of unusual naval activity in September 1979,1 came upon a "notice to mariners" in the South African Shipping News and Fishing Industry Review, a monthly journal...

...No, he said, but the fishing was great...

...Such steps have provoked a "white backlash," particularly strong among Afrikaner dirt farmers and blue-collar workers, reminiscent of the one that swept the United States following the civil rights reforms of the mid-1960s...

...P. van Leeuwen—and wished me luck...

...My consultant explained that the essence of atomic bomb manufacture, once the fuel is on hand, is the arranging of the surrounding explosive charges in such a way that they compress the fuel with perfect symmetry, creating a critical mass...

...help in the early 1960s, and for Koeberg, South Africa's first nuclear power reactor, now under construction on the Atlantic coast north of Cape Town...

...in a compound on the mill site...

...If there are people who are thinking of doing something else, I suggest they think twice about it...

...What of the Afrikaners themselves...

...You are paid about $18(1 a month, which is more than most other nonwhite laborers make anywhere in North America, but one-sixth of what white laborers receive for comparable work in the same factory- Not many years ago...

...van Leeuwen was out for the day, but she could assure me no tour was possible...

...Cohen, a Johannesburg energy consultant: "The West can jolly well stuff it...

...There is a complete absence of communication in South Africa...

...when, under intense diplomatic pressure, they gave public assurances they would not proceed with a nuclear weapons test...

...De Villiers, the AEB president, stiffened at the first mention of the subject: "You know, I've stopped answering that question," he said testily...

...Openness served me well as a factfinding tool and may also have helped protect me from South African laws which treat unauthorized activity in the nuclear held as akin to espionage (A South African academic...

...The secretary, sounding increasingly suspicious, asked me why I wanted to do that and went on to inquire about The Progressive...

...when blacks were not permit-led lo walk on the sidewalks of Johannes-bu rg Those days are gone forever...

...But the satellite could not pinpoint the occurrence in the vast stretch of ocean encompassed by its lens, and no hard, undisputed corroboratory evidence has ever come to public light...

...Mis advice came to be my operating guide in South Africa: I probed openly and rcpcatcdU into a subject seldom mentioned above a whisper in that country, eliciting responses sometimes more interesting for what they omitted than what they touched on...

...Nothing I learned in South Africa this summer lent credibility to the hoax theory...

...Once again, I had found no proof that would stand up in a court of law...

...I could not readily ask for an official introduction to the factory Bui the fact that AECI is a conglomerate spilling over into many fields gave me a chance to get my foot in the corporate door...

...Whether Dr...

...Friedel Sellschop, a nuclear physics professor whom I interviewed later at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg...

...My strategy was to find out who had placed the order for The Progressive subscription, make contact, and see what developed...

...From across the bay I peered at the peninsula from which the South African navy had barred the public three years earlier...

...From Pretoria to Cape Town, from the sitting rooms of the Johannesburg Country Club to the beer Walls of Soweto, I polled South African journalists, questioned dozens of English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites, and interviewed militant young blacks who have all but given up on the prospect of peaceful change for their sorely divided country...

...Leaving me alone in his office during the course of our tour of the sprawling, campuslike grounds, he excused himself to sign some papers at his secretary's desk and then returned in a moment to find me studying a globe of the Earth resting on a shelf at one end of the room...

...Five years ago...

...I identified myself and asked to speak with the person who had ordered our magazine at the end of 1980...

...The next day I gave it another stab, trying to bypass the manager and his secretary by going directly to the librarian...

...South Africa even has its own George Wallace—an Afrikaner ideologue...

...satellite over the Southern Hemisphere...

...South Africa is by no means the only country in the world where blacks are exploited by whites, but only in South Africa are the exploiters a tiny minority...

...Schle-singer gave me the name of the Somerset West manager—J...

...Anthony R. Newby-Fraser, director of external relations and official historian of the South African Atomic Energy Board (Raad op AtoomKrag) has a placard on his office wall which reads, "Diplomacy: the art of telling someone to go to hell in such a way that he looks forward to the journey...

...Meanwhile...

...or a permanent resident of Mime oiher "homeland" designated for you by the white government in Washington as your place of citizenship on the basis of vour ethnicity...

...Why should we care what you think...

...Not one of the dozen or so with whom I discussed the subject doubted the existence of the weapon or the readiness of the government to use it...

...Within a few weeks after my arrival in Johannesburg I found myself in an office at the company's plunt at nearby Moddcrfonlein...

...A friend in a Los Angeles think tank, who has access to classified information, told me that the Vela incident had been a U.S...

...With few exceptions, such work had their firm support...

...The allusion to a new secret weapon, noticed and recorded by only one of the many reporters at Cape Town's packed City Hall Auditorium on the night of September 25, was all but lost in a torrent of what seemed at the time like far weightier fare: Botha's triumphant return to his home base at Cape Town on the first anniversary of his accession to power, following the downfall of John Vorster in the sensational Information Department scandal of 1978...

...I wouldn't go near there if I were you...

...Was Saldanha the port from which South Africa embarked on its nuclear weapons test, somewhere far to the south...

...But it did uncover an unusual pattern of naval interest and activity in that out-of-the-way spot at a crucial time three years ago...

...The same point was made to me in a different way by Robert Molloy, science correspondent for the Cape Times, who has spearheaded opposition to construction of the nearby Koeberg nuclear power plant...

...The whites do not want to communicate...

...By the time U.S...

...But the incident typefied the Alice-in-Wonderland feel to the situations that ensued whenever the subject of the South African nuclear weapons test came up...

...radiation "sniffer" planes reached the South Atlantic, the corroborating evidence—if there had been any—was gone...

...My journey took me to the offices of South African policymakers who are knowledgeable but tight-lipped about the government's decision seven years ago, following military reversals in Angola and growing isolation from the Western world, to extract an atomic weapons capability from nuclear facilities that had been developed for peaceful commercial purposes...

...Oscar Dhlomo, Chief Buthelezi's minister of education and culture, whom I met on a visit to the Zulu capital of Ulundi, told me that South Africa's shifting of some one million Zulus to Swaziland was a form of punishment to the Zulus for refusing to accept the "independent homeland" policy which is a cornerstone of apartheid...

...My questions about a South African atomic bomb produced empty looks from otherwise well-informed people in and out of government...

...11 Both public and private sectors of the economy, beset by the worst skilled-labor shortage in the country's history, are pulling out the stops to educate and train enough blacks to keep the wheels of industry turning...

...Japanese and certain other privileged non-Caucasians enjoy the legal status of "honorary whites" in South Africa...

...Wynand de Villiers, president of the Atomic Energy Board, countered my questions with expressions of indignation over U.S...

...Eventually, a special investigating committee appointed by President Carter's science adviser concluded that what the satellite saw was most likely the product of a collision with a tiny meteorite no bigger than a grain of sand...

...Others outside South Africa speculated about an Israeli nuclear weapon test, undertaken either in cooperation with South Africa or independently and in such a way as to divert suspicion to the South Africans...

...nuclear deterrence policy to argue that an openly declared nuclear weapons capability was the best defense against the "total onslaught" for which white South Africa has long been preparing...

...intelligence botch...

...Inkatha, a Zulu nationalist movement headed by Gatsha Buthelezi, chief of South Africa's largest black tribe, has been trying to negotiate better terms, short of majority rule, for Zulus and other South African blacks...

...And by frankly specifying my interest in the energy field, I fashioned a safe base for focusing my inquiries progressively from energy to nuclear energy to nuclear weaponry...

...The extraordinary secrecy surrounding the place does not seem warranted by the government's professed desire to keep its enrichment techniques from the eyes of foreign competitors...

...It was down there near Langeban," pointing in the direction from which I had come...

...Look for evidence of regular and sustained conventional explosives testing...

...You cannot legally live anywhere except the place that some white man has specified as your abode...

...The printer scratched his chin for a moment and then replied: "Oh, yes, I remember...

...The two scientists, both genial, third-generation South Africans of English descent, could soon tell that my interest in methanol was limited...

...One was in Cape Town and two were in the Johannesburg area, but it was the fourth that caught my eye...

...I really can't imagine what Donald Sole meant," Newby-Fraser remarked later...

...In the nearby town of Vredenburg, I dropped by the office of the region's weekly newspaper, Die Weslander, and chatted with a printer I found working over an old press, his arms up to his elbows in ink...

...I'll put you through to the chief chemist, Mr...

...He said his own best guess was that the Kalahari photographs were of a missile test site...

...But what raised suspicion was South Africa's refusal to open the plant to international inspection and its continuing reluctance to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which binds signatory nations to forswear the weapons option in exchange for commercial nuclear technology benefits...

...We look at it the same way you do...

...I held the globe out for him to see: "Look, it's practically all water when you look at it this way...

...Telephoning the Somerset West manager's office, I identified myself as an American journalist and said I'd like to visit the explosives operation...

...The successful test of the weapon on September 22, 1979, made South Africa the seventh nation to detonate a nuclear device and the first since the U.S...

...It tells of men, women and even children who braved dangers daily so that we may live in peace and safety...

...Of all the government facilities in South Africa, Valindaba—separated by a security fence from the relatively open Pelindaba research center—was the only one to which I was refused entry and where no interviews were allowed...

...In Soweto, we celebrated Mugabe's election as though it were our own victory," said a young black man whom I can identify only by the fictitious name of Ja-bulani because his dedication to the elimination of apartheid would make him a "terrorist" under South African law...

...your wage was one-twentieth of what youi while counterpart earned You cannot vote...

...Two American students of the South African scene, Kenneth Adelman and Albin Knight, in a 1981 study for the Stanford Research Institute, pointed to the rise of Dr...

...It was conceived in the mid-1970s as an ace-in-the-hole to ensure survival of Pretoria's beleaguered white minority regime...

...International suspicion about South Africa's actual entry into the nuclear weapons club was aroused by the news, which leaked out more than a month after the event, of the sighting of a mysterious flash by a U.S...

...It seemed obvious at the time that South Africa had been caught red-handed, and I made that point to my hosts this summer...

...It's very dangerous...

...The map also showed a "military practice area" just offshore...

...That requires a great deal of expertise and much testing with conventional high explosives...

...Jabulani and a friend, Mangethe (also a fictitious name), both of whom hold white-collar jobs, spent a couple of hours on one of my last nights in Johannesburg telling me why they have virtually given up on peaceful change in South Africa...

...president of the Atomic Energy Board...

...BY SAMUEL H.DAY JR...

...S.H.D...

...But, in fact, the cost of an atomic bomb is not inordinately high once you have manufactured a supply of the highly enriched uranium South Africa already is producing—ostensibly to meet its peaceful needs...

...When, a few days later, the British, West Germans, and Americans added their voices, with the United States threatening to sever diplomatic relations, the South African government retreated into silence and permitted President Carter to issue a triumphant statement announcing that he had wrung from Prime Minister Vorster a pledge that South Africa would never test a nuclear weapon on its soil...

...Botha was at the height of his political power that night, well on the way to moving the country toward racial reform of sorts, unchallenged on the Left or Right, untroubled for the moment by serious pressure from inside or outside South Africa...

...Taking another tack, I asked her if I could visit the company library and meet the librarian, who was one of our subscribers...

...Journalists and others in South Africa to whom [ confided my mission were astounded that I had attracted no notice from the police, They were mistaken, I am convinced, in their predictions that mv mail would be opened and my telephone tapped...

...had ordered the magazine under the mistaken impression that it was a technical journal dealing with nuclear weapons design...

...P. W. Botha, yesterday prompted renewed speculation about South Africa's nuclear capability by stating that the country might possess a secret weapon...

...When the Soviet Union first raised the cry, on August 8, 1977, about South African nuclear weapons test preparations in the Kalahari, the charge was dismissed by Pretoria as Russian propaganda...

...of ancestors who respected the culture and material possessions of others but who were prepared to defend themselves bravely against unprovoked attack...

...I had to admit that I was...

...Do you always look at it this way...

...Such precautions struck me as unusual, even in security-conscious South Africa, hut thev were only a mild foreshadowing of ihe tor-tress mcntalit) I w as to encounter at AECI How was I to check out the Somerset West dynamite factors without arousing suspicion' l:\plosivcs did not fit logically into the subject—energy policy—I had specified to the South African tourist authorities as m\ aiea of rcptirtori.il interest Hence...

...The houses are owned by the Federal Government, rented or leased to the tenants, and administered through a board headquartered in downtown Chicago...

...What distinguishes the racial politics of South Africa from those of the United States and every other nation is the numbers...

...U-235, from its natural ratio of .7 per cent to the 3 or 4 per cent required for nuclear power production could, with strenuous recycling, also enrich it to the 90 per cent level necessary for atomic bomb fuel...

...Most whites with whom I discussed inc subject tented enthusiastically to the idea of an Afrikaner Bomb...

...In South Africa, I found no evidence of high explosives work at the nuclear research center at Pelindaba or at the adjacent uranium enrichment plant at Valindaba...

...The globe was inverted from its customary position, with the Southern Hemisphere on top...

...But, notwithstanding the conclusion reached by President Carter's special commission, the evidence of a South African test has always been substantial...

...It seemed to make sense then for South Africa, a leading uranium producer, to take this step so that the raw material could be exported in enriched—and hence more profitable—form...

...Our people still had their eyes on the Kalahari and were caught off guard by the unexpected development to the south, he said...

...nuclear weapons laboratory at Los Alamos, New Mexico, and in later years has become an apostle of tough anti-proliferation measures l( will be like looking for a needle in a thousand haystacks...

...They mentioned that the two plants—one near Johannesburg and the other outside of Cape Town—were traditional rivals...

...I asked—especially after the Vela satellite sighting came to light on October 25, just a month later...

...The white government's determination to preserve the essential features of apartheid, come what may, also risks destruction of a black political force that offers the most likely practical alternative to change through violent revolution...

...Despite widespread international suspicion about South Africa's nuclear intentions, the impact of its entry into the nuclear weapons club has been obscured by uncertainties as to the facts—doubts that have been sedulously fostered by the Pretoria government in tacit cooperation with the United States...

...They used it for machinegun firing practice...

...I decided to have a look...

...One of my first visits in Johannesburg was to the headquarters of AECI in the fifty-story Carlton Center, the tallest office building south of the Equator, where entry to the company offices is through guarded doors with electronic control devices, and where signs in the elevator ad\ ise that v isi-tors to AECI Ltd must report to security control on the fourteenth floor...

...The attitude that the Christian state may never take up the sword and must suffer for justice is dangerous cowardice...

...Noweto has a single movie theater, a single hospital, thousands of beer halls and liquor stores lis box-like houses, in some of which four families share a single water tap, stretch row upon row as far as the eye can see...

...I walked the docks and beaches of a small, out-of-the-way South Atlantic fishing and industrial port which may well have been the embarkation point for a flotilla that put quietly to sea three years ago to test the two- to three-kiloton device that made South Africa a nuclear weapons power...

...But I persisted: "Surely you must have been curious about what the Americans and the others were so upset about...

...Not once during the two-week diplomatic contretemps had the South Africans demanded proof of the allegations, or attempted to show where the Soviets and Americans had made a mistake...

...She told me this was before her time, so I asked her to guess who the person might have been...

...Furthermore, to many whites the pace of impending change seems hardly less than revolutionary: 11 The central government is offering the franchise to two large nbnwhite population groups, the 2.5 million "coloureds" of mixed black and white ancestry and the 800,000 "Asians" whose ancestors came to South Africa from India as indentured servants...

...I approached (but could not enter) the equally well-guarded laboratory and proving ground of a huge explosives manufacturing plant near Cape Town which was in all likelihood.the assembly plant for South Africa's first nuclear warhead...

...That the magnifying glass bore any connection to the celebrated Vela satellite sighting, which was made over the same part of the globe, was doubtless my imagination at work...

...No, a diamond mine," said Dr...

...South Africa's undoubted nuclear weapons production capability and the ambiguous occurrences of 1977 and 1979 unquestionably placed an Afrikaner Bomb within the realm of possibility some time ago...

...I met no blacks who felt the current or prospective pace of change comes close to being adequate...

...Nuclear power is a growing issue in Cape Town, he explained to me, "but I steer clear of the bomb stuff...

...Do you know what that was all about...

...He gave me some back copies of Die Weslander...

...But I persisted, explaining with a laugh that I wanted to meet the company librarian because he was one of our subscribers...

...Walters, chief of staff of the South African navy, said he suspected an accident aboard a Soviet nuclear submarine...

...She was angry and insistent, demanding to know if I were the same person who had called the day before...

...She announced with finality that there was no way I could get into the Somerset West plant and that it would be fruitless to call the company manager the next day, as we had agreed earlier...

...Her slip was as close as I could come to establishing the AECI connection...

...Lukas Daniel Barnard, a thirty-three-year-old political science professor who two years ago became minister of national security in Botha's cabinet...

...like a vast army encampment...

...chatting with Collin Schlesmger and Lincoln J. Partridge, who are in charge of a project to make methanol, a liquid fuel, out of coal...

...But we can enrich uranium . .. and we did not sign theNPT...

...Why didn't you follow up on the story...

...The South African Department of Foreign Affairs and Information became my early ally, arranging initial appointments for me...

...They might find out we have military weapons they do not know about.' "Mr...