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Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons
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.
