How Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to apartheid regime of South Africa

Although independent blogs and on-line news services on the Internet offer an amazing amount of unbiased information, most Americans still rely on the mainstream media to get their news. This over reliance on the mainstream media has promoted or inhibited the public’s understanding and perspective surrounding news events.

The most prevailing example of this was the run up to the Iraq War in 2003, where most Americans were mislead into believing that the terrorist attacks on September 11th were connected to Saddam Hussein. Other examples include framing the systematic torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004 as only abuse and not the politically damaging description of torture. Both of these news events were allowed to be managed and then framed by communication officials within the Bush administration to attain their political objectives. The refusal of the mainstream press to discuss Israeli’s nuclear weapons arsenal is the latest example of the mainstream media in inhibiting the American public’s understanding of events related to Iran’s nuclear energy program.

In a recent blog posting on War in Context, the blog writes about a recent Guardian Newspaper article that details how Israeli offered nuclear weapons to the apartheid run government of South Africa in1975.

As reported by the Guardian Newspaper,

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 mainstream press in America needs to stop its own policy of ambiguity in how it covers the issue of Iran, Israel, and nuclear weapons. As over 5,000 American families who have lost a loved one serving in Iraq, the failure of the main stream media in covering this issue is a matter of life and death.