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Documentary evidence of Israel’s nuclear weapons

ISRAEL OFFERED TO SELL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO SOUTH AFRICA – FIRST HARD EVIDENCE ISRAEL HAS THE BOMB, San Francisco Sentinel, 23 May 2010, By Chris McGreal The London Guardian 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.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of “ambiguity” in neither confirming nor denying their existence………The existence of Israel’s nuclear weapons programme was revealed by Mordechai Vanunu to the Sunday Times in 1986. He provided photographs taken inside the Dimona nuclear site and gave detailed descriptions of the processes involved in producing part of the nuclear material but provided no written documentation.

San Francisco Sentinel » Blog Archives » ISRAEL OFFERED TO SELL NUCLEAR WEAPONS TO SOUTH AFRICA – FIRST HARD EVIDENCE ISRAEL HAS THE BOMB

May 24, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Israel, weapons and war | antinuclear, nuclear, nuclear secrecy, nuclear spin, nuclear weapons