U.S.

unease about nuclearweapons fuel takes aim at

a South African vault

So
uth Africa stores nearly a quarter-ton of uranium that could be readily fashioned into an
atomic bomb at the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Center. (Douglas Birch/Center for
Public Integrity)

By Douglas Birch and R. Jeffrey Smith | Center for Public Integrity-March 14

at 11:53 AM

PELINDABA, South Africa Enough nuclear explosive to fuel half a dozen bombs,
each powerful enough to obliterate central Washington or most of Lower Manhattan,
is locked in a former silver vault at a nuclear research center near the South African

capital.
Technicians extracted the highly enriched uranium from the apartheid regimes
nuclear weapons in 1990, then melted the fuel down and cast it into ingots. Over the
years, some of the cache has been used to make medical isotopes, but roughly 485
pounds remains, and South Africa is keeping a tight grip on it.
That gives this country which has insisted that the United States and other world
powers destroy their nuclear arsenals a theoretical ability to regain its former status
as a nuclear-weapons state. But what really worries the United States is that the
nuclear explosives here could be stolen and used by militants to commit the worst
terror attack in history.
Senior current and former U.S. officials say they have reason to be concerned. On a
cold night in November 2007, two teams of raiders breached the fences here at the
Pelindaba research center, set in the rolling scrubland a half-hours drive west of
Pretoria, the countrys administrative capital. One group penetrated deep into the site
unchallenged and broke into the sites central alarm station. They were stopped only
because a substitute watch officer summoned others.
[Read: How armed intruders stormed their way into the plant]
The episode remains a source of contention between Pretoria and Washington because
no suspects were ever charged with the assault, and officials here have dismissed it as a
minor, bungled burglary. U.S. officials and experts backed up by a confidential
South African security report say to the contrary that the assailants appeared to
know what they were doing and what they wanted: the bomb-grade uranium. They
also say the raid came perilously close to succeeding.
The episode still spooks Washington, which as a result has waged a discreet diplomatic
campaign to persuade South Africa to get rid of its large and, by U.S. reckoning, highly
vulnerable stock of nuclear-weapons fuel.

Graphic: Global sto

ck of weapons
uranium VIEW GRAPHIC
But South African President Jacob Zuma, like his predecessors, has resisted the White
Houses persistent entreaties and generous incentives to do so, for reasons that have
partly baffled and enormously frustrated the Americans.
President Obama, in a previously undisclosed private letter sent to Zuma in August
2011, went so far as to warn Zuma that a terrorist nuclear attack would be a global
catastrophe. He proposed that South Africa transform its nuclear explosives into
benign reactor fuel, with U.S. help.
[Read: Letter from President Obama to President Zuma in 2011]
If Zuma agreed, the White House would trumpet their deal at a 2012 summit on
nuclear security in South Korea, Obama wrote, according to a copy of the letter.
Together, he said, the two nations could better protect people around the world.
Zuma was unmoved, however, and in a letter of his own, he insisted that South Africa

needs its nuclear materials and was capable of keeping them secure. He did not accept
a related appeal from Obama two years later, current and former senior U.S. officials
said.
Differing points of view

The United States says there are reasons to be concerned about South
Africas nuclear explosives. (Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse/Getty
Images)
Washington may bear a special responsibility for ensuring that South Africas
materials do not wind up in the wrong hands.
Over nine years ending in 1965, it helped South Africa build its first nuclear reactor
under the Atoms for Peace program and then trained scientists to run it with U.S.supplied, weapons-grade uranium fuel. Washington finally cut off the fuel supply in
1976, after becoming convinced the apartheid regime had used nuclear research to
create a clandestine bomb program, fueled by its own highly enriched uranium.
[Read: Letter from President Obama to President Zuma in 2013]
The apartheid regime hatched the bomb program at a time when it faced sabotage at
home, wars on its borders and increasing international isolation. But by the end of the
Cold War, the government realized that its whites-only rule would have to be scrapped,
and so its leaders ordered the weapons destroyed and the production facilities

dismantled, while holding onto the explosive fuel.

In interviews, top officials in both countries made clear that they see the issue through
different prisms. Zumas appointees assert that it is absurd for the United States to
obsess over the security of the countrys small stockpile while downplaying the starker
threat posed by the big powers nuclear arsenals.
Raising the threat of nuclear terror, officials here say, is an excuse to restrict the spread
of peaceful and profitable nuclear technology to the developing world, and to South
Africa in particular.

This claim of being singled out is similar to that made by another emerging nuclear
power: Iran. And for good reason: Both countries defiantly constructed facilities to
enrich uranium in the past, over foreign opposition, and want the rest of the world to
agree they have a right to do it in the future. They have long been diplomatic friends
and trading partners and have discussed helping one anothers nuclear research.
But this demand for enrichment rights which Tehran wants enshrined in an
agreement with six great powers is hardly theirs alone. Although the Obama
administration has tried to discourage uranium enrichment everywhere, leaders in
Brazil, Argentina, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Jordan and South Korea say they see

nuclear power, along with the ability to enrich uranium, as their right.
By most accounts, Iran doesnt have significant amounts of weapons uranium, only the
means to make it. But it stands accused by theInternational Atomic Energy
Agency (IAEA) and behind it, by the United Nations Security Council with failing
to come clean about past nuclear work with weapons applications. Thats why Iran has
been hit with sanctions.
South Africa, in contrast, was praised by the IAEA in 1995 for transparency and
openness in discussing its weapons program. The agency also declared it had no
reason to suspect that South Africas inventory of fissile materials was incomplete or
that the program had not been completely stopped and dismantled.
Unlike Iran, however, South Africa already possesses highly enriched uranium
nearly a quarter-ton of it, which the United States has tried but failed to pry loose.
Thats why current and former U.S. officials say that South Africa is now the worlds
largest uncooperative holder of nuclear explosives, outside of the nine existing nuclear
powers.
Few outside the weapons states possess such a large stockpile of prime weapons
material, and none has been as defiant of U.S. pressure to give it up.
Told what this story would say, the South African government responded Friday with a
statement reaffirming its view that the November 2007 break-in was a run-of-the-mill
burglary and asserting that the weapons uranium is safe.
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
countrys foreign ministry, called the Department of International Relations and
Cooperation. He said the 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.

A crime problem
Experts consider highly enriched uranium the terrorists nuclear explosive of choice. A
bombs worth could fit in a five-pound sack and emit so little radiation that it could be
carried around in a backpack with little hazard to the wearer. Physicists say a sizable
nuclear blast could be readily achieved by slamming two shaped chunks of it together
at high speed.
Several months before becoming responsible for White House nonproliferation
policies last year, arms control expert Jon Wolfsthal told the Center for Public Integrity
in an interview that the U.S. motives for seeking to clean out South Africas weapons
uranium were straightforward and that they focused on the stockpile held at
Pelindaba.

Graphic: Break-in at
Pelindaba Nuclear Research Center VIEW GRAPHIC
The bottom line is that South Africa has a crime problem, Wolfsthal said. They have
a facility that is holding onto material that they dont 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.
Thanks in part to U.S. efforts, just nine nonnuclear-weapon states besides South Africa
still have enough enriched uranium to build a nuclear weapon, although mostly not in
a readily usable form, according to Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the
James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies: Germany, Japan, Canada, Belgium,
Kazakhstan, Poland, Italy, the Netherlands and Belarus.
Each has been similarly asked by Washington and its allies to reduce or eliminate their
stocks of highly enriched uranium. Canada, Japan, Kazakhstan, Italy and Poland
promised publicly at the 2014 White House nuclear security summit to reduce their
holdings in the next few years. Belgium said it would eliminate its stocks in time.
For South Africa, maintaining a grip on its bomb fuel is tangled up with its national
pride, its suspicion of big power motivations and its anger over Washingtons past halfmeasures in opposing apartheid. Its a technical issue with an emotional overhang,
said Donald Gips, the U.S. ambassador to South Africa from 2009 to 2013.
Some of its top officials complained privately, Gips said, that Washingtons pressure
stems from a conviction that Africans cannot be trusted to keep nuclear materials.
Other South Africans have said that by refusing to let go of its uranium, the country
retains the higher political and scientific stature of a country such as Japan, which is
considered nuclear weapons-capable while possessing none.
The chief obstacle to achieving one of the White Houses top arms control priorities,
according to U.S. officials, is Zuma, the president since May 2009. He led the
ruling African National Congress (ANC) to another victory last year with 62percent of
the vote and could serve at least through 2019.
Zuma, a former ANC intelligence chief, is a shrewd populist and one of the most

influential figures in the Non-Aligned Movement representing 120 mostly developing

nations. Thats why Washington thought swift action by Zuma could set a valuable
precedent.
Obamas election was celebrated here, and the two presidents seemed to forge a
personal bond at their first meeting in July 2009, raising White House hopes for
progress. A team of senior Energy and State department officials traveled to Pretoria a
month later to sell the idea of relinquishing the explosive materials.
Obama invited Zuma to a series of White House summits on nuclear security and
dispatched scientists from U.S. nuclear-weapons labs and FBI antiterrorist experts to
help protect the 2010 World Cup in Johannesburg against nuclear-related threats.
After Zuma nonetheless rejected Obamas 2011 plea, Obama raised the issue again,
during a trip to Pretoria in June 2013.
This time, he privately asked Zuma to relinquish a different trove of weapons-usable
uranium still embedded in older reactor fuel that by U.S. accounts is lightly guarded
in exchange for a free shipment of 772pounds of fresh, non-weapons-usable reactor
fuel, valued at $5million.
Obama followed up with a three-page letter in December 2013, two days after he spoke
with Zuma at Nelson Mandelas memorial service in Soweto. According to a copy of the
letter, he urged Zuma to seal this new deal at aMarch 2014 nuclear summit in the
Netherlands.
Although technical experts held preliminary talks, Zuma never accepted the swap and
didnt bother to attend that summit, sending Foreign Minister Maite NkoanaMashabane in his place.
There, the South African emissary told reporters that the summits should wrap up
their work and leave nuclear security to the IAEA, which considers the expansion of

civilian nuclear power a key mission.

Fear of what could go wrong with nuclear technology, she said, should not violate the
inalienable rights of countries to use enriched uranium for peaceful purposes. We
have no ambition for building a bomb again. That is past history, Nkoana-Mashabane
said. But we want to use this resource.
South Africa has used some of the former bomb fuel to make medical and industrial
isotopes generating $85million in income a year. But about six years ago, South
Africa started making the isotopes with low-enriched uranium that poses little
proliferation risk a decision that robbed it of its long-standing rationale for keeping
the materials.
Now officials here say theyre retaining their weapons uranium partly because
someday someone may find a new, as-yet-undiscovered, commercial application. If
and when one is found, a senior South African diplomat said in an interview, itll be
like OPEC to the power of 10, where states without the material would be at the mercy
of a cartel of foreign suppliers.
Ambassador No

As a member of the International Atomic Energy Agencys governing board

from 1995 to 2011, Abdul Samad Minty was considered a leader of the NonAligned Movement of 140 mostly developing nations, many of them
skeptical of nonproliferation programs. (Douglas Birch/Center for Public
Integrity)
Pretorias determination to keep its weapons uranium dates to the apartheid era, but
the most vocal advocate in democratic South Africa has been Abdul Samad Minty, who
served for most of the past two decades as his countrys top nuclear policymaker.
Gary Samore, the White House coordinator on weapons of mass destruction from
2009 to 2013, called Minty a worthy adversary for me in all of the nuclear security
summits, who was deeply, emotionally opposed to giving up their HEU.
Minty, 75, now South Africas ambassador to U.N. agencies headquartered in Geneva,
sipped green tea in his office as he explained that it is the United States that is
recalcitrant. Even as it campaigns to halt the spread of nuclear weapons, he says, it
refuses to part with its own.
The problem is you cant have nuclear-weapons states who feel they can have nuclear
weapons and have as many as they want, he said.
Stocks of fissile materials held by countries outside the small club of nuclear-weapons
states, he said, are just not that important a threat, compared with the thousands of
nuclear weapons held by the bigger powers.
As an ANC activist for 30 years, Minty successfully pushed to have the regime expelled
from the IAEAs Board of Governors. Named South Africas top representative to the
IAEA in 1995, Minty became a regular thorn in the side of the West. He abstained in
2005 and 2006 on resolutions referring Irans nuclear program to the U.N. Security
Council, arguing the resolutions were procedurally flawed or premature.
The IAEA, the 75-year-old diplomat said, cannot be used as a tool to undermine the
basic right of nonnuclear countries to develop their own nuclear industries, by

setting expensive and restrictive security standards.

He also harshly criticized the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty in which the members
of the U.N. Security Council agreed to get rid of their nuclear arsenals if the rest of the
world promised not to acquire them for not pressuring the major powers to disarm.
Yes they are reducing, not disarming, Minty said. 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 cant tell someone else not to smoke, Minty said.
Bitterness and resentment
U.S. officials reject this reasoning. Nuclear disarmament is not going to happen,
Samore said he told Minty, and waiting for it is a dangerous excuse for inaction. Its a
fantasy. We need our weapons for our safety, and were not going to give them up.
According to U.S. officials and experts, South Africa uses only about 16.5pounds of its
remaining stock of weapons uranium to make isotopes annually, out of a total stockpile
estimated by foreign experts at around 485pounds. And it need not use it at all.
Some American officials say they think Minty still bears a grudge from vigorous U.S.
opposition to his bid to replace Mohamed ElBaradei as director general of the IAEA in
2009. Minty fought hard, but he had angered U.S. officials by making supportive
comments about Iran, including an assertion early in 2008 that there is increasing
confidence in the Iranian enrichment program.
Getting beyond the impasse
Waldo Stumpf, a longtime atomic energy official in South Africa who presided over the
dismantlement of the apartheid-era bomb program, said in an interview that handing
over the highly enriched uranium was never part of the thinking here. Not within Mr.
[Frederik W.] de Klerks 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?
In fact, South Africa intends not only to keep its existing enriched uranium, officials
here say, but also insists on the right to make or acquire 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.
Asked about South Africas policy, a former senior Obama administration official who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities said that after
U.S. officials pressed their arguments at every level possible, he became convinced
that South Africa would not give up its nuclear explosives so long as Zuma remains in
power.
Xolisa Mabhongo, who served from 2010 to 2014 as South Africas ambassador to the
IAEA and last year moved to a senior executive post at the South African Nuclear
Energy Corp., confirmed this assessment.
I dont think there is any incentive that can be offered that South Africa would trade
for its weapons uranium, Mabhongo said. Its our property. We do not see the need to
give it to anybody else. [President Thabo] Mbeki explained this to Bush, and Zuma
explained this to Obama. So I dont think this position is ever going to change.
Birch reported from Washington and South Africa; Smith reported from
Washington. This article comes from the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan,
nonprofit investigative news organization.

Posted by Thavam