Swiss helped SA with nukes

2005-10-27 22:55

Bradley S Klapper

Geneva - Neutral Switzerland played a key role in building the nuclear weapons of the former apartheid regime of South Africa, a government-sponsored report said on Thursday.

"Swiss industry got around the arms embargo that the UN had imposed on South Africa in grand style," said Peter Hug, a historian who produced one of the reports in the Swiss National Science Foundation's six-year investigation into Swiss-South African relations.

Germany was among the countries that also played a role, Hug said, but he gave no details on their involvement.

"The fissionable material needed for this originated from the uranium enrichment that South Africa had built up with technical support from Switzerland, Germany and other countries," Hug, a history professor at the University of Bern, wrote in his 11-page report for the project.

Six nuclear weapons

South Africa built six nuclear weapons and partially assembled a seventh between the 1970s and 1993, when then-President FW de Klerk stood in front of parliament to disclose the programme and announce that the bombs had all been dismantled.

De Klerk renounced the programme that had been aimed at neighbouring states opposed to apartheid and Cold War instability that was fuelling the war in nearby Angola.

Hug said a handful of companies and a government research institute were involved in South Africa's atomic programme.

In 1977, one firm began to supply "highly sensitive technology" to South Africa's uranium enrichment programme. The deal was for at least 100 million Swiss francs, he said.

"Though details are not clear, deliveries occurred via the subsidiary in South Africa," he said.

Hug said another Swiss company helped supply aluminium vacuum outlets to South Africa, which "played an important role in uranium enrichment", he said.

Swiss government

While the Swiss government did little to prevent these transactions taking place, it also allowed "close scientific and technology co-operation" to exist between a government nuclear research centre and South Africa.

"The administration was informed of many illegal and semi-legal deals.

"It tolerated them in silence, supported some of them actively, or criticized them only half-heartedly," Hug found.

The nuclear research centre aided South Africa between 1971 and 1985 in the sectors of acceleration technology and uranium enrichment, Hug said.

It was there that "South African atomic scientists were trained and gained the know-how to build a South African accelerator", he said.

Firms with branches in Switzerland also dealt with uranium that they had obtained from Namibia, in violation of international law, Hug said.

'Pillar of support'

In an announcement on the completion of the project, the foundation said the overall study, which focused on all aspects of relations between the two countries, "illuminates a dark chapter in Switzerland's recent history".

Other reports covered political co-operation, trade and the relationship of Swiss churches to South Africa.

"Switzerland was a pillar of support for the apartheid government in various ways," Hug said.

The study, released in the Swiss capital of Bern, was based on access to government archives and cost about $1.5m.

It said the relationship with South Africa was at its most intensive in the 1980s, when most of the world shunned the racially segregated state.

After the mid-1980s, most Western countries, including the United States, imposed sweeping embargoes to try to bring an end to the policies of white domination.

Switzerland maintained this was incompatible with its neutrality and would have few practical results apart from worsening the plight of the population - but it was increasingly isolated in its viewpoint, the report pointed out.

Only after the end of the Cold War did the Swiss government reassess its neutrality and decide to go along with punitive international sanctions such as UN embargoes against Iraq, Libya and Yugoslavia.

Switzerland, which stayed out of the United Nations for five decades, did not join the world body until 2002 because of worries that its neutrality could be compromised.

On the Net:

Centre for Non-proliferation Studies: http://cns.miis.edu/research/safrica/chron.htm

- AP