An article published in
The Washington Post about South Africa and nuclear explosives. The article is
descriptive, informative and details the concern America has toward the stubbornness
of President Jacob Zuma not wanting to give up its nuclear explosives. America is convinced that as long as Zuma
remains in power nothing will change.
What does Zuma want to do with all this nuclear power that
was created during the apartheid era.
Quotations from the article
“The bottom line is that South Africa has a
crime problem,” Wolfsthal said. “They have a facility that is holding onto
material that they don’t 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.”
Differing points of
view
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. Zuma’s appointees assert that
it is absurd for the United States to obsess over the security of the country’s
small stockpile while downplaying the starker threat posed by the big powers’
nuclear arsenals.
But South African President Jacob Zuma, like his
predecessors, has resisted the White House’s 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.
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.
That’s why current and former U.S. officials say that South
Africa is now the world’s largest uncooperative holder of nuclear explosives,
outside of the nine existing nuclear powers.
Read the entire article on this link:
U.S. unease about nuclear-weapons fuel takes aim at a South
African vault
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| Zuma - "its mine ALL mine!" |
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