On June 7, the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C., sponsored a discussion of the Polakow-Suransky book in which Shimon Peres is said to have offered apartheid South Africa nuclear weapons–the subject of an earlier blog. The discussion involved several experts on Israel and international affairs, notably Avner Cohen, author of The Worst Kept Secret: Israel’s Bargain with the Bomb (1998). Whether coincidentally or not, Polakow-Suransky’s new book has the strikingly similar title, The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa.
Thanks to a reliable friend who was at the discussion, I can report the following:
–It’s key to bear in mind that the “transaction” making the headlines in papers like The Guardian and the New York Times never actually took place; Cohen sees what Peres did as a “probe,” not even an offer
–Though Polakow-Suransky and Cohen agreed that Israel did not transfer fissile material or a bomb design to South Africa, Israel did sell the apartheid regime 30 grams of tritium and bought from it 500-600 tons of uranium yellowcake
–The two countries cooperated substantially on missile development
–Regarding the suspected 1979 test in the South Atlantic, Polakow-Suransky found no smoking gun in the documents he assessed, but considering all he heard, he agreed with Seymour Hersch’s conclusion that it was an Israeli atomic bomb test done in cooperation with the South African navy.
Cohen declined to talk about whatever his Israeli sources told him on the subject of the Vela flash, but noted that then-CIA Director Stansfield Turner later said he believed it was an Israeli test, contrary to a U.S. commission that had found otherwise, mainly because no radiation signature was ever detected.
