The British Guardian published an article Monday claiming that President Shimon Peres offered to sell nuclear weapons to South Africa. The offer was allegedly made in 1975, during Peres's term as Defense Minister, when South Africa was still under apartheid, the report claimed.
The report was based on classified documents that South African officials gave United States academic Sasha Polakow-Suransky. Polakow-Suransky has released a book entitled, “The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Alliance with Apartheid South Africa.”
While Polakow-Suransky and writers at the Guardian interpreted the documents as referring to nuclear weapons, the pages contain no explicit references to such weapons. The minutes of one meeting state that “Minister Peres said the correct payload was available in three sizes,” Polakow-Suransky inferred that one of the “three sizes” was a nuclear payload.
In a second document, a South African general writes about missiles “armed with nuclear warheads manufactured in RSA [South Africa] or elsewhere.” As South Africa was not known to have nuclear capability, the document was taken by the newspaper as evidence that the general was referring to the purchase of weapons from Israel.
Peres vehemently denied the allegations. “There exists no basis in reality for the claims published this morning by The Guardian,” his spokespeople said. “Israel has never negotiated the exchange of nuclear weapons with South Africa. There exists no Israeli document or Israeli signature on a document that such negotiations took place.”
The Guardian “elected to write its piece based on the selective interpretation of South African documents and not on concrete facts,” they said. “The Office of the President regrets The Guardian's decision to publish such an article without requesting comment from any Israeli officials.”
The allegations come at a politically sensitive time, as Israel pushes for international action on Iran's nuclear program and shortly after Israel was pressured to sign the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Israel has never admitted publicly to having nuclear weapons.