#just thought i'd bring this back up with the ICJ hearings
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heritageposts · 10 months ago
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Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons. The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret. The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.
. . . continues at the guardian (24th of may, 2010)
here's also a research paper published in 2004, which, looking at declassified south african documents, lays out apartheid south africa's rational for acquiring nuclear weapons (bombing, or 'deterring,' black liberation groups):
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