Thirty-two years after the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) declared its readiness to undertake, through an international agreement to be concluded under UN auspices, not to manufacture or acquire control of Atomic Weapons at its first ordinary session held in Cairo, Egypt in July of 1964 – a process set in motion by the February 13, 1960 French Nuclear Test at Reggan in the Algerian desert – the Treaty of Pelindaba was signed in the Egyptian capital on April 11, 1996 establishing a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone (NWFZ) on the African continent. This followed a Joint Meeting held in Johannesburg, South Africa from 29 May to 2 June 1995 at which the Inter-governmental Group of Experts of the OAU and the OAU/UN Group of Experts had adopted the Pelindaba Text of the African NWFZ Treaty. The text was then submitted to the OAU Council of Ministers at its 62nd Ordinary Session held in Addis Ababa from 21 to 23 June 1995 and at which it was adopted by them as amended by resolution OAU CM/Res. 1592 (LXII)/Rev.1. This, in turn, paved the way for its adoption by the 31st Ordinary Session of the OAU Assembly of Heads of State and Government at a meeting in Addis Ababa between 26 and 28 June 1995. On December 12, 1995 the UN General Assembly welcomed the Treaty of Pelindaba, opening it up for signature the following year.
Forty-five of the fifty-three OAU member states signed Pelindaba at the 1996 Cairo meeting, with abstentions from Madagascar and the Seychelles and the non-participation of Liberia and Somalia due to internal unrest (these four states have all since signed on). In concert with the Treaty of Tlatelolco (which established a NWFZ in Latin America), the Treaty of Bangkok (establishing a NWFZ in South East Asia) and the Treaty of Rarotonga (establishing the same in the Pacific) these agreements effectively ban the manufacture or use of Nuclear Weapons throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
The Pelindaba Treaty bound its signatories not to conduct research on, develop, manufacture, stockpile or otherwise acquire, possess or have control over any Nuclear Explosive Device by any means anywhere; not to seek or receive any assistance in the research on, development, manufacture, stockpiling or acquisition, or possession of any Nuclear Explosive Device; prohibited the stationing of any Nuclear Explosive Device on ANWFZ territory; and prohibited the testing of any Nuclear Explosive Device. It required all States parties to declare any capability for the manufacture of Nuclear Explosive Devices; to dismantle and destroy any Nuclear Explosive Device manufactured prior to the coming into force of the Treaty; to destroy facilities for the manufacture of Nuclear Explosive Devices or, where possible, to convert them to peaceful uses; and to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) to verify the processes of dismantling and destruction of the Nuclear Explosive Devices, as well as the destruction or conversion of the facilities for their production. In addition each party undertook to effectively implement (or to use as guidelines) the measures contained in the Bamako Convention on the Ban of the Import into Africa and Control of Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes within Africa in so far as it was relevant to Radioactive Waste; and not to take any action to assist or encourage the dumping of Radioactive Waste and other Radioactive Matter anywhere within the ANWFZ. The parties were also required to conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA for the purpose of verifying compliance with their undertakings and to maintain the highest standards of security and effective physical protection of Nuclear Materials, Facilities and Equipment to prevent theft or unauthorised use and handling. (The IAEA currently applies safeguards to 26 Nuclear Installations in five African Union (AU) member states party to both Pelindaba and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), namely Egypt, Ghana, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, South Africa and the DRC, and in one State – Algeria – pursuant to facility-specific agreements.) Finally, each party undertook not to take, assist or encourage any action aimed at an armed attack by conventional or other means against Nuclear Installations in the ANWFZ.
Like the NPT, however, the pact included a provision allowing member states, in exercising their National Sovereignty, to withdraw “IF (THEY) DECIDE THAT EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS, RELATED TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE TREATY, HAVE JEOPARDISED (THEIR) SUPREME INTERESTS.” Four of the (then) five declared Nuclear Weapon States (the US, UK, France and China) signed two Protocols attached to the treaty in which they undertook “not to use or threaten to use a Nuclear Explosive Device against any party to the treaty or any territory within the African NWFZ” and “not to test or assist or encourage the testing of any Nuclear Explosive Device anywhere within the African NWFZ.” And though the White House signed those Protocols it did so with the reservation that neither the Treaty (nor Protocol III therein) applied to the activities of the United Kingdom, the United States or any other state party to it on the island of Diego Garcia (or elsewhere in the British Indian Ocean Territories) and that, accordingly, no change would be required to US Armed Forces operations there. It is for this reason that Russia – the fifth Nuclear State – withheld its own signature.
The ink had barely dried on this agreement when, fifteen days later, the (then) US Defence Secretary William Perry of the Clinton Administration – during an April 26 speech at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama (and in blatant disregard of his country’s NPT & Pelindaba undertakings) – threatened to drop a B61-11 Variable Yield/Earth Penetrating Tactical Nuclear Weapon on a suspected “Chemical Weapons Plant” at Tarhunah, 37 miles southeast of Tripoli in Libya – a treaty member. This followed remarks made by a National Security Council staffer, Bob Bell, during an April 11 White House press briefing at which he stated that the US pledge not to use Nuclear Weapons against a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty “will not limit options available to the US in response to an attack by an ANWFZ party using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).” His threats were reinforced later that same month by comments made by the Assistant Secretary of Defence Kenneth Bacon at a Pentagon briefing during which he disclosed that the US was considering a number of options for destroying the alleged Libyan weapons factory which “could require, could include, the use of Nuclear Weapons.”
Coming on the heels of revelations about the activities of white Nuclear Scientists associated with the Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program of South Africa and their efforts to share their know-how with dissident Afrikaner extremist elements (some of whom are suspected of having custody of up to 10 Thermonuclear and Neutron Devices that were never declared and dismantled as part of the post-Apartheid “roll back” of its Nuclear Capability and who remain determined to reverse Black Majority rule) along with the enduring Nuclear Threat to the North African nations of Egypt, Algeria, Libya and the Sudan posed by Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Arsenal – coupled with the US decision to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and go forward with the deployment of a global National Missile Defence System or NMD (along with the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review revealing US plans to use Nuclear Weapons against at least one Non-nuclear African state, namely Libya) – it has become abundantly clear that both the NPT and Pelindaba Treaties are themselves now little more than worthless pieces of tissue paper.
These developments clearly pose a direct challenge to the National Security of the African Union (AU) and demand the strongest possible response in both word and deed. To that end the government of South Africa, under the leadership of His Excellency President Thabo Mbeki, should revive the Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program and utilise its Nuclear Materials & Installations along with the Nuclear Scientific talents of the African World (and in conjunction with the Nuclear Establishments of Algeria & Egypt) in order to bring into existence a Pan African Nuclear Deterrent Option – the “BLACK BOMB” – for the collective defence of the AU from what is plainly a clear and present Nuclear Danger to its member states.
Quite apart from the protection this will afford the Union from the aforementioned perils the acquisition of Nuclear Weapons by the AU will transform the International Stature of the continental formation. It will enable Africa to both guarantee its own security from internal threats as well as deter any external US or NATO aggression of the kind to which Libya was subjected in 1986 and the Sudan in 1998. It will give the AU the means to project power and provide a Nuclear Umbrella to the Black Nations of the Caribbean Basin – most of whose peoples are descended from African slaves – thus equipping them with the tools with which to repulse US military adventurism of the type inflicted upon the islands of Grenada and Panama (in 1983 and 1989 respectively). This Nuclear Umbrella will also extend into the US heartland itself to provide existential shelter and security to the forty million African-Americans in that country and ultimately provide a global Nuclear Security Blanket to the world’s one billion Africans. The Black Bomb – Africa’s force de frappe – will place the AU on the road to becoming a genuine Superpower within the International System – indeed, the Fifth of the Great Powers (alongside the US, Russia, China and India), thereby transforming the identity of the African World and boosting the self-esteem of people of African Descent throughout the planet. A Nuclear Armed African Union will alter the very basis of the International System and constitute Africa’s contribution to bridging the global Nuclear Divide and establishing a Nuclear Symmetry between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres (similar to the East-West strategic equilibrium that obtained during the Cold War). This will enhance Global Security. Through the establishment of a Nuclear Armed Quadruple Entente between the AU, Russia, China and India we will effectively checkmate US/NATO expansionism (as it proceeds apace behind the smokescreen of the post-9/11 “War on Terror”), undercut their NMD plans and punish any misadventure by the EU’s Rapid Reaction Force. An African Bomb will help to prevent a Second Holocaust of the kind that Africans endured during the Slavery and Colonial eras and enable us to exact maximum Nuclear Retribution, at a moment’s notice, against any future Imperialist Predators. The Black Bomb Program will constitute the Final Act of the Nuclear Weapons Age, revolutionising the strategic identity and global role of the African continent and forcing into the open the nakedly racist asymmetry and hypocrisy of an international “Non-proliferation” Order that allows some states to possess Nuclear Weapons while denying that right to others. In this way the Atomic Arsenal of the AU will contribute to the creation of a New Global Democracy in which all states are truly equal. What the ISLAMIC BOMB is to the MUSLIM World and the ISRAELI BOMB is to World JEWRY the BLACK BOMB will be to the AFRICAN World.
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The excellent Nuclear Materials and Infrastructure inherited from the Apartheid regime by the Black Majority Government of South Africa – along with the Nuclear Establishments of Algeria and Egypt – provide the African Union with a solid basis for a Pan African “MANHATTAN PROJECT” through which to produce advanced Nuclear Weapons. A 2001 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that the Algerian Nuclear Program had equipped itself with the installations necessary to carry out all of the activities linked to the complete cycle for obtaining Military Grade Plutonium. The Es Salam Nuclear Reactor and associated Hot Cell Laboratory (with an underground channel connecting the two), located near the city of Birine, some 250 kilometres south of Algiers, currently serves as the nerve centre of that country’s Nuclear Program. In 1991, US spy satellites engaged in rigorous photo-reconnaissance operations over North Africa (and undoubtedly acting on a tip-off from Spain’s Higher Centre for Defence Intelligence, or CESID, which operates an extensive spy network throughout the region) are reported to have stumbled across the construction of Nuclear Reactors and associated facilities at this location. The site featured, among other installations, a 15 MW Thermal Heavy Water Reactor purchased from Argentina. A reactor of this size, using Low-Enriched Uranium fuel for irradiation purposes, is capable of producing several kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium per year. In 1984 Algeria purchased 150 tons of Yellowcake (Uranium Ore Concentrate) from Niger for use in its Nuclear Program. The recent discovery of Uranium in the Hoggar region of the country will further reduce Algeria’s future dependence on outside sources for its Nuclear Fuel needs. In 1997 China agreed to provide the country with a Radioisotope Production Laboratory for the production of Cobalt-60 to be sold to other member states of the AU and may supply her with a Heavy Water Production Plant at some point in the future. The Nuclear Plant at Es Salam is capable of producing as much as 6 kilograms of weapon-usable Plutonium per year through either (1) the irradiation of Natural Uranium Targets in the core or (2) increasing the reloads of Low-Enriched Uranium Fuel or (3) a switch to Natural Uranium Fuel. The pressing need to bring a Pan African Atom Bomb into being as soon as possible makes Target Irradiation the preferred option. The Hot Cells could be employed to cut up the fuel or target elements and reprocess some irradiated uranium. The Radioisotope Lab is the place most likely to facilitate the dissolution of the irradiated material and expedite the chemical extraction of the Plutonium. Fabrication of the targets could be carried out at the Fuel Fabrication plant at Draria. In addition, the country looks set to take delivery, at some point in the future, of a number of Silicon Graphics High Performance Computers or HPC’s (8.5 billion theoretical operations per second, by some estimates) essential in the design of Nuclear Warheads and the modelling of the implosive shock waves that detonate them. These machines are also indispensable for the simulation of the aerodynamics of Ballistic Missiles. Between 1960 and 1965 France carried out no less than 14 underground Nuclear Tests at two separate locations in the Algerian desert. With most of these sub-surface sites still intact and a 2000-strong staff of well trained specialists (300 of whom are highly qualified Nuclear Engineers) operating under the aegis of the country’s Nuclear Energy Commission, Algeria’s Nuclear Industrial Complex is poised to form an important part of the African Union’s Nuclear Deterrent Program. Indeed, a July 1998 CESID report to the Madrid Government concluded that, “the knowledge obtained by an impressive staff of experts and scientists, as well as the availability of the installations which it will have at the end of the century, will place the country in an advantageous position to restart a Military Program if the corresponding political decision is taken.” Such a decision, if made, will ensure that the AU won’t be the emasculated international eunuch that its predecessor, the OAU, was.
For its part, South Africa’s former Nuclear Weapons Installations included: the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre (consisting of the Safari-1 20MW Research Reactor, Hot Cell Complex, Aerodynamic Process Enrichment Plant, U3O8-UF6 Conversion Plant, HEU-UF6 Production Plant, MTR Fuel Fabrication Facility & the Thabana Hill/Radiation Hill Waste Disposal site), the Valindaba/Pelindaba East “Y-Plant” Uranium Enrichment Facility & the Advena Central Laboratories/Kentron Circle Facility. Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre was the site at which the first Apartheid Nuclear Device was designed and produced. It was also the location at which the criticality test for the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) core of the device was tested. This location included facilities for machining High Explosives for Implosion Weapons and for the related Testing & Firing. Advanced Weapons Design research was also conducted here. The Safari-1 Research Reactor, supplied by the US, was commissioned in 1965 and placed under IAEA safeguards. Over the next ten years the US provided the facility with around 100 kilograms of Weapon Grade Uranium Fuel. These fuel shipments were suspended in 1975 as the Apartheid state steadily came under international sanctions regimes. At present South Africa’s Atomic Energy Corporation (AEC) retains a large inventory of Weapon Grade HEU-235 at this site. The “Y-Plant” at Valindaba/Pelindaba East was the site at which HEU for Nuclear Weapons was produced. It employed a novel aerodynamic process for the separation of the lighter U-235 isotope from the heavier U-238 fraction through the centrifugal effects of spinning Uranium Hexafluoride and Hydrogen gases inside a tube. It is estimated that up to 550 kilograms of HEU was produced at this site. A Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (MLIS) facility was also located here. Advena/Kentron Circle was the location at which the Nuclear Weapons themselves were developed and produced. Advanced Warhead Designs were also researched at this facility. At present this facility has “extensive capabilities in high-speed electronics, theoretical calculations/modelling, metallurgy, environmental & reliability testing and ultra high-speed diagnostics.” Of particular importance to the AU are its capabilities in the design of high explosives that produce shaped shock waves. Taken together (and refurbished where required) these installations comprise the African Union’s LOS ALAMOS. It is here that the Black Bomb will be born.
According to the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) South Africa assigned about 450 kilograms of HEU enriched over 80% to its Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program. Roughly 20-25% was HEU enriched to about 80%; the remainder was enriched to 90-95%. Since the early 1990’s the country has used some 50-70 kilograms of this material to fuel the Safari Research Reactor. The balance, some 400 kilograms of 90%-plus HEU-235 extracted from dismantled weapons, remains at Pelindaba under IAEA safeguards. A 1994 study by the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) estimating that a country possessing a “low technical capability” could build a 20-Kt Nuclear Device with only 16 kilograms of HEU means that the Fissile Material currently possessed by Thabo Mbeki’s Government is sufficient for the production of 25 Fission-Type NUCLEAR WARHEADS (which, if fabricated with sufficient quantities of Tritium, could boost their explosive yield to 100-Kt – 100,000 tons of TNT or five Nagasaki’s-worth of nuclear explosive power – per weapon) for the African Union’s Nuclear Deterrent Arsenal.
A 1995 report (published in The Nonproliferation Review) by Frank V. Pabian, an official with the US Department of Energy, revealed that US nuclear co-operation with South Africa began in the closing days of World War II with the search for Uranium for the then-secret “Manhattan Project” – America’s effort to build the Atomic Bomb. In 1950, to secure guaranteed supplies of Natural Uranium for their expanding Nuclear Weapons programs, the US and UK signed a purchasing agreement with South Africa that provided the impetus for that country’s development into one of the world’s major Uranium producers. A 1974 South African Government report concluded that US assistance to the country’s nuclear establishment via the so-called “Plowshare Program” made feasible the development of a Nuclear Explosive Device “for peaceful uses”. This “peaceful” program was nevertheless kept under strict secrecy following the adverse international reaction to India’s “peaceful” Nuclear Test in May of that year. The rise of Black Nationalist military resistance to the Apartheid regime during the 1970’s (coupled with increased international isolation as a result of its racist policies) “forced” the South African government to redirect their clandestine “peaceful” Nuclear Program to the development of Nuclear Weapons. At the 31st Session of the UN General Assembly in 1976, African nations made an appeal “to all states not to deliver to South Africa or place at its disposal any equipment or fissionable material or technology that will enable the racist regime of South Africa to acquire a Nuclear Weapon Capability” until it had abandoned its Apartheid policies and acceded to the NPT. In a 1978 memorandum arising from talks between South Africa and the US, the Apartheid regime sought to rationalise its refusal to sign the Treaty by arguing that, “It must be realised that South Africa is threatened by the Soviet Union and its associates and certain African countries with Soviet support and encouragement. South Africa has no hope of any assistance from the UN in case of attack. On the contrary, it is continually being threatened with action under Chapter VII of the Charter of the UN. While this state of affairs continues, South Africa cannot in the interest of its own security sign the NPT and thus set the minds of its would-be attackers at rest, allowing them to proceed freely with their plans against us.”
As a result South Africa, according to Pabian, took the two-fold decision to “establish a completely autonomous once-through Nuclear Fuel Cycle (i.e. no reprocessing) to meet all of the requirements of its Research and Power Reactors and thereby free itself from dependence on unreliable outside supplier states and proceed with a major transformation and expansion of its Nuclear Weapons Program.” This effort was established to include: the production of a number of Gun-Assembled Nuclear Weapons & their associated Air-Drop Delivery Systems; studies of Implosion & Thermonuclear technology and the accompanying Ballistic Missile delivery systems; and research & development for the production of Plutonium, Lithium-6 and Tritium at the Gouriqua site on the Cape Coast. With active Israeli support in (and Western connivance at) South African sanctions-busting efforts, a 1989 article in Engineering Week was able to report that the White Supremacist regime had managed to acquire “an advanced detonics laboratory featuring Flash X-ray Analysis and Ultra-High Speed Photography (up to 20 million frames per second) for recording detonation phenomena” – the imaging equipment necessary to fulfil the requirements of an Implosion-type Nuclear Weapons research & development program. It had also successfully procured a Hot Isostatic Press, useful in “press-forming high explosives into spherical shapes for use in Implosion-type Nuclear Weapons” (as well as indigenously developing a Cold Isostatic Press used to “manufacture the Tungsten Tamper parts for South Africa’s Gun-Assembled Nuclear Weapons”). A 1983 UN study into South Africa’s Nuclear Program noted the supply to the country of Helium-3, described as a material from which “Tritium, an element used in Thermonuclear Weapons, could be derived.” The source of this substance was almost certainly the State of Israel. Other equipment procured by the racist regime included: vibration test equipment (“which could be used to test the reliability of Nuclear Warheads”); multi-channel analyzers (“capable of analysing complex data at a test site”); and a Cyber 170/175 Computer (“powerful enough to model a Nuclear Explosion”). The South Africans also successfully obtained an unclassified US Navy Handbook 255 entitled, “Nuclear Weapons Systems, Safety, Design, and Evaluation, Criteria For” which, again according to Pabian, enabled their weapons designers to “think through and resolve safety problems that might otherwise have been inherent in their own design.” Nevertheless, there were other development and production difficulties that had to be overcome in designing a reliable Gun-Type Device which, according to the ISIS’s David Albright, included: assuring the “repeatability of the projectile velocity; repeatability of symmetry requirements when the projectile is injected; the density of the Neutron Reflectors; the plating of Uranium components with Nickel; and the reliability of the Arming & Safing devices.”
In the fall of 1990, a few months prior to South Africa’s accession to the NPT, a UN committee approved by an overwhelming majority a resolution declaring that country’s Nuclear Capability a “threat to international peace.” Three countries – the US, France & the UK – OPPOSED the resolution, which was adopted in the General Assembly’s main political committee. The aforementioned three countries, with the addition of Israel, again OPPOSED another UN resolution demanding that South Africa submit all of its Nuclear Facilities to IAEA inspection. A final resolution condemning the build-up of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Capability was again RESISTED by the four countries already mentioned, this time with the addition of Liechtenstein. The role that these nations (along with others) are believed to have played, in joint efforts with South Africa, in the procurement of a mysterious substance known as “RED MERCURY 20:20” (as part of the so-called Project Shampoo) during the 1980’s may well have motivated their resistance to international scrutiny of the Apartheid regime’s WMD program. This gel-like polymer (a combination of Pure Mercury & Mercury Antimony Oxide) apparently performs an important function in Pure Fusion Weapons – possibly through the alteration of the Fusion Process itself – to create “clean” explosions (hence the name “shampoo”) and Apartheid South Africa is widely believed to have developed, but never declared, several such weapons.
Having inherited Fissile Material – some 450 kilograms of 90%-plus HEU-235 in Metal Form – from the Apartheid regime (and thus surmounted the main technical hurdle on the road to a Nuclear Explosive Capability) the Black Majority Government of South Africa has been spared many of the R&D efforts described above. All that the AU now needs is to develop or acquire an efficient Warhead Design and the components – Explosive Lenses, Neutron Generators, Tampers, Electronic Firing Circuits, etc. – out of which to assemble several weapons and, providing the HEU is recast and a number of associated technical tasks are completed, Africa will at last have “the Bomb”.
One of history’s lesser-known facts is that a number of Black Nuclear Scientists played central roles in America’s WWII-era “Manhattan Project” – the Los Alamos-based effort that produced the world’s first Atomic Bomb. They include Nuclear Physicists, Chemists and Mathematicians like Lloyd Albert Quaterman, Ernest J. Wilkins, Sidney Thompson, Clarence Turner, Robert J. Omohundro, Sherman Carter, Jasper Jeffries, Benjamin Scott, Ralph Gardner, Harold Evans, Clyde Dillard, Edwin R. Russell, George W. Reed, Moddie D. Taylor and the brothers William J. & Lawrence H. Knox. The Inorganic Chemist Moddie Taylor was based at the University of Chicago and it was his (& his colleagues) role in the Project to demonstrate that a fissionable material could achieve critical mass, thus proving that Nuclear Fission could be used as an energy source – or a weapon. Physicist Lloyd Quaterman was specifically praised by the US Secretary of War for “work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb, thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of WWII.” The Physicist & Mathematician Ernest J. Wilkins – the “BLACK OPPENHEIMER” – was a member of the Enrico Fermi research team and played a central role in helping to solve the riddle of the atom. ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the two Atom Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US Government in 1945, were armed with high-grade Uranium from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Congo. So central were Black Scientists to the Los Alamos effort that the eminent white physicist Arthur Holly Compton remarked that the Atom Bomb project was unique in bringing together “coloured and white, Christian and Jew” for a common purpose. This observation holds an important lesson for the Pan African “Manhattan Project”. A May 1994 editorial in the New York Times reported that a group of 16 recently laid-off ex-Apartheid Nuclear Scientists had threatened to sell their know-how to the highest bidder unless they received a million-dollar severance package. Some of these disgruntled former members of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program have, indeed, placed themselves at the disposal of elements in the Afrikaner “Third Force” (believed to include top SADF military officers, former AEC & Armscor officials, National Party politicians and Afrikaner industrialists) who aim to use a form of Nuclear Blackmail, at some future point, to either reverse Black Political Rule in the country as a whole or secure a White Homeland (or Volkstaat) within it. Such aspirations on the part of this population group exceed the bounds of the sheerest folly and represent a woeful waste of their scientific skills. One of the ways in which these Nuclear Specialists could make themselves useful – and, in the process, redeem themselves for having served a vile white supremacist regime – is by placing their talents at the disposal of the AU and playing their part in the development of the PAN AFRICAN ATOMIC BOMB. In this way they will not only realise their full potential as Nuclear Weapon Scientists but they will also prove to the rest of the continent that they really are “every bit as African as any Black Man”.
On 24 March 1993 the then-Apartheid government of F.W. De Klerk announced to the world that South Africa had built, and then dismantled, seven “Gun-Type” Nuclear Devices. The haste with which his regime decided to cancel its Nuclear Weapons Program in 1991, sign the NPT and accept IAEA safeguards was, in the words of an ex-diplomat associated with that administration, “motivated by concern that it didn’t want any undeclared Nuclear Material or Infrastructure falling into the hands of Nelson Mandela and the ANC.” This paranoia was shared by both the US and British Governments which offered to buy up South Africa’s inventory of Weapon Grade Uranium before Mandela came to power – thus underlining the fear and dread with which they viewed the prospect of a NUCLEAR ARMED BLACK AFRICA. (Indeed, disturbing evidence of what appears to be a systematic effort to keep nuclear know-how out of Black Hands has emerged over the years. In 1970 a Black American Plasma Physics specialist based at the University of Kinshasa (then Lovanium University) – and engaged in an effort to train Congolese scientists in how to take full advantage of their Belgian-built Nuclear Reactor – was dismissed from his teaching post on the grounds that he didn’t speak French well enough. More recently, the November 25, 1997 issue of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper reported that a Black South African Radiation Physicist, Mojalefa Murphy, had been fired as Executive General Manager of the South African Atomic Energy Corporation’s (AEC) Corporate External Relations for allegedly failing to submit proof of all credit-card expenses and failing to follow proper procedure in dismissing an employee. The following year, the June 26 issue of the same newspaper reported that yet another top Nuclear Physicist, Zimbabwe-born Marcel Dube – Executive General Manager of Technical Services and the only Black member of the AEC board – had also been expelled from the organisation after being accused of fraudulently obtaining South African citizenship. As the custodian of South Africa’s inventory of HEU-235 it is clear that the AEC’s white management feel that “the Blacks” are getting “too close for comfort” to the building blocks of a Nuclear Weapon Capability.) South Africa has since faced shrill demands that she “blend down” her current stocks of HEU with Natural or Depleted Uranium to produce Low Enriched Uranium (LEU). To its eternal credit the Mandela Government resisted these noisy ravings and its Safari-1 Research Reactor continues to be powered by Weapon-Grade HEU-235 material. The successor (and current) administration of President Thabo Mbeki should stand ready to seize this material – along with the AEC’s HEU inventory – and make it available for the fabrication of the Pan African Atomic Bomb.
Furthermore, the time has now come for the AU to locate Africa’s equivalent of America’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, Israel’s Ernst David Bergmann, Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan, Iraq’s Jaffar Dhia Jaffar and the other great Warrior-Scientists of our time and embark upon the assembly of the scientific talents and resources that will comprise the Pan African “Manhattan Project”. It will be the task of these men and women to give Africa the Bomb – no matter what the cost.
The African World does, indeed, boast a number of exceptional scientific minds whose skills are directly applicable to such an undertaking. The University of Michigan’s Dr. Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian-born Computer Scientist and winner of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize (which recognises significant achievements in the application of Supercomputers to Scientific and Engineering Problems), programmed the Cray Connection Machine – a massively parallel, single-instruction, multiple-data system – to execute 3.1 billion calculations per second using 65,536 one-bit 32Kbyte processors. His feat represented a breakthrough in the world’s understanding of the capabilities of High Performance Computers (HPC’s). The role of HPC’s in simulating the conditions within an exploding Nuclear Warhead (useful in the maintenance, refinement and development of Nuclear Weapons without the need for the sorts of tests prohibited under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or CTBT) and Dr. Emeagwali’s undoubted abilities in the “scaling up” of basic HPC’s to higher speeds (through the networking of these machines to perform parallel, simultaneous computation) make his talents of immense value to the AU’s Nuclear Deterrent Program. The task of African supercomputer scientists like Dr. Emeagwali will be to develop within Africa the indigenous computing power and capability to simulate a Nuclear Weapon’s explosion in Three Dimensions. This will, among other things, enable the AU to improve its weapon designs (through the utilisation of MCNPT-, DOT3.5- and NJOYC-type computer codes), refine its warhead packaging & primary-to-secondary coupling concepts and eventually give the AU the ability to develop W88-like miniaturised, tapered Thermonuclear Warheads.
A 1994 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that the South African Uranium Enrichment process utilised “an aerodynamic technique similar to a stationary wall centrifuge. Uranium Hexafluoride and Hydrogen Gas spin inside a small stationary tube. The centrifugal effect created by the rapid spinning causes the Uranium Separation. The mixture enters at high speed through holes in the side of the tube and spirals towards the end of the tube. When the mixture reaches the holes at the end of the tube, the radius of curvature is reduced several-fold, significantly increasing the separation of Uranium Isotopes. The heavy fraction, containing more U-238, exits to the side. The lighter fraction, which contains more U-235, exits straight out the end.” It will fall to the AU’s Nuclear Engineers to develop this process (along with the Gas Centrifuge, Thermal/Gaseous Diffusion, EMIS, Chemical/Ion Exchange and Laser Isotope Separation – both AVLIS & MLIS – methods) for the production of Fissile Material for the Black Bomb.
In addition to the Algerian and South African Nuclear Establishments already described Egypt, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) all have Teaching Nuclear Reactors. The DRC has had a Belgian-built Nuclear Reactor at the University of Kinshasa (and operated under the leadership of Professor Malu wa Kalenga) for over 30 years. It is currently managed by Nuclear Science Professor Butsana bu Niungu, head of the university’s Physics Department. There are over a dozen Kenyans presently working in the US and EU who are trained in the managing of Nuclear Power Plants. The Radiation Protection Board of Kenya, inaugurated in 1982 under the founding chairmanship of Ambassador Thomas Ogada, has plans to acquire a Teaching Nuclear Reactor to supplement the Nuclear Chemistry and Nuclear Science departments at the University of Nairobi. Egypt acquired its first 2MW Research Reactor from the Soviet Union in 1961. Opened by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser at Inchass in the Nile Delta, it was followed in 1992 with the purchase of an Argentine 22MW Nuclear Reactor the construction of which was completed in 1998. According to the project supervisor (and Deputy Chairman of the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority), Mr Ibrahim El-Dakhli, the new reactor is to be used to produce Radioactive Isotopes and Cobalt-60 for use in medical treatment. And a September 2000 article in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reported that a series of top-level meetings involving Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and Argentina’s President Fernando De La Rua (and at least six Zimbabwean cabinet ministers) had taken place that year and at which plans for a super Nuclear Reactor to be built in Zimbabwe by INVAP, an Argentine Nuclear Technology company, had been thrashed out. At the meetings INVAP had put a proposal to the Zimbabwean Government in which it was suggested that the country begin with a modest Research Facility and then build up to a much larger Power Generating Reactor. These proposals were the outcome of a 1999 official visit to Argentina by President Mugabe during which the possibility of “South-South” Nuclear Co-operation was discussed with the Argentine President at Government House in Buenos Aires. The proposed reactor would be Africa’s largest and would be designed to address Zimbabwe’s acute electricity needs. This visit was followed by a series of meetings in Harare between the Argentine Ambassador Enrique Pareja and senior Zimbabwean government officials and at which the INVAP proposal was formally submitted. Such a development, if consummated, would make Zimbabwe (along with all of the other national programs detailed above) an important piece in Africa’s emerging Nuclear Jigsaw. With over 30,000 African PhD-holders living outside of the AU – many with degrees in Nuclear Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering and Metallurgy – along with an abundance of technocratic & managerial talent in the field of Nuclear Energy scattered throughout the billion-strong African World, the Union is more than adequately endowed with the human, industrial and natural resources it requires to become a global Military Nuclear Power by 2008. All that is lacking is the corresponding Political Will and Strategic Imagination on the part of Africa’s so-called “leaders”.
The African continent, comprising a landmass of 19 million square miles and capable of accommodating the United States of America, Western & Central Europe, India, China, Argentina and New Zealand within its confines, was geologically born over 3 billion years ago. The first Bipedal Hominids (creatures that walk on Two Feet) came into existence and evolved into Human Beings in this territory. From there they migrated to other parts of the World. Traditionally seen as a repository of significant Metallic Mineral Resources – the continent is also an Oil & Natural Gas Powerhouse in its own right. According to a 1999 report prepared by the Centre for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Africa presently accounts for nearly 10% of the world’s supply of petroleum, with the US dependent on her for over 15% of all of its annual oil imports. This figure is set to rise to nearly 25% by the year 2005 and this will make Africa’s oil supply to America STRATEGIC in its importance. With proven oil reserves of over 75 billion barrels in 2000 and estimated reserves of as many as 200 billion barrels, if not more, the African Union will be responsible for providing one out of every four new barrels of oil to come on stream outside of the Persian Gulf states) in the next four years. The decline of Europe’s North Sea production will enhance the significance of the African continent’s “Black Gold” as the US seeks to reduce its reliance on unstable Middle Eastern sources. America’s $10 billion of direct investment in Africa’s petroleum sector exceeds its stake in either Latin America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia (including the Caspian Sea region) & the Middle East. US firms are projected to invest as much as $50 billion in regional exploration and production this decade as they greedily eye-up the TRILLIONS of dollars in revenues to be had from the exploitation of her energy resources. The African continent has vast potential in natural gas production, liquefied natural gas, refining, petrochemicals, electricity production and nuclear energy. Most of this potential is to be found in the states presently known as Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Algeria, Cameroon, Sudan, Congo, DRC, Chad, Uganda and Equatorial Guinea but includes many other states across the continent. The recent discoveries of billion barrel oil deposits in both Sudan and Uganda, in particular, could indicate that many sub-Saharan African nations – Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, South Africa et al – may well be sitting atop a Caspian Sea-style Oil & Natural Gas Bonanza without realising it. In addition, the AU’s virtual monopoly of the world’s most Strategic Minerals – Chromium, Manganese, Vanadium and the Platinum-group Metals – provide her with immense leverage in a world where the proliferation of WMD has become the principal security threat the West seeks to contain. As a single state, Africa would easily surpass the United States of America as the most powerful country on Earth. As a Nuclear Armed African Union (and one that included the Black Nations of the Caribbean Basin as member states) it has the potential to become the greatest of history’s Great Powers.
In order to realise this potential the AU must demand the immediate conversion of its $350 billion External Debt to the West into a Reparations “Write Off” – a deduction of that sum from the $300 TRILLION they owe to Africa in Slavery and Colonialism Reparations (calculated at a rate of $100 Trillion in compensation for the One Hundred Million victims of the Middle Passage Holocaust – or $1 million per victim, a further $100 Trillion in compensation to the descendants of New World Slaves for 350 years of unpaid labour and a final $100 Trillion for the descendants of those Africans who endured the murderous rule & plunder of the European during his “Scramble for Africa” and subsequent colonial rule of the continent). This will leave the West owing a modest $299.65 TRILLION to the continent and its people. The US and EU’s point-blank refusal to pay full Reparations to Africa for these Holocausts (and for which they are entirely responsible) coupled with the ruthless enforcement of the aforementioned crippling Debt Burden – along with the callous prevarication over the provision of affordable HIV/AIDS medication to the utterly devastated peoples of Africa – can only be construed as a cold-blooded and premeditated GENOCIDAL SCHEME against an entire race – one whose people are effectively being subjected to a continent-wide equivalent of the 1994 Rwanda Holocaust. With the US dependent on the AU for 15% of its annual petroleum needs, an African-led OIL EMBARGO of that country & the EU (if carried out in concert with non-African OPEC member states) could bring the economies of those two entities to their knees in a matter of weeks.
On the 22nd of September 1979, an orbiting US Vela meteorological satellite detected a brief, intense double flash of light near South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands. Code-named Operation Phenix/Phoenix, this joint Israeli-South African Neutron Bomb Test has now been confirmed in a recently declassified, but heavily redacted, study titled “Low Yield Nuclear Explosion Calculations: The 9/22/79 Vela Signal” (originally published in 1982). Evidence has long since emerged that Israel provided the Apartheid regime with 30 grams of Tritium (to enhance the explosive power of its warheads) in return for 600 metric tonnes of Yellowcake for its Nuclear Plant at Dimona. The AU’s leadership needs to make it plain to the US and EU that their attempts to sabotage the pre-9/11 UN World Conference Against Racism (held in Durban, South Africa one week before the spectacular, paradigm-shifting al-Qa’ida Airborne Attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon) and subvert the payment of full Reparations to the African and Diaspora descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism Holocausts will result in their awakening one morning to the CNN “Breaking News” announcement that another ‘Alert 747/Vela 6911’ satellite incident has occurred. Only this time the burst of radiance in the South Atlantic will have resulted from a joint Afro-Iranian Nuclear Test.
Article 3, section (M) of the Constitutive Act (CA) of the African Union aims, as one of its objectives, to “advance the development of the continent by promoting research in all fields, in particular in science and technology”. To this end scientific co-operation with Iran, India, China and others in the Civilian and Military Applications of Nuclear Energy should be aggressively pursued with the aim of producing a Pan African Nuclear Deterrent at the earliest possible date. Article 4, section (D) of the CA calls for the “establishment of a common defence policy for the African Continent”. To realise this objective the AU needs to establish an African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) – a million-strong, hi-tech army of reproductively-cloned Nuclear Armed African Warriors, as it were – for the collective defence of the AU’s member states from internal and external threats. A Nuclear Weapons Capability should form an integral part of the Union’s Defence Posture. Article 4, section (H) provides for “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” and section (J) allows for “the right of Member States to request intervention from the Union in order to restore peace and security.” Both of these provisions open the way for the AU to pioneer a Nuclear Policy that could serve as a model for the rest of the world, namely, the use of a Pan African Nuclear Capability as a deterrent to intra-state and inter-state conflict. If a central authority within Africa can successfully utilise Nuclear Weapons to deter Africans from fighting and killing other Africans the international community will have found a workable model for the way in which the Nuclear Arsenals of the world’s Nuclear Powers could be surrendered to a single Global Authority which would alone have the right to employ Nuclear Weapons on Planet Earth. This Global Authority – the Global Security Executive – would use the threat of Nuclear Force to deter intrastate and interstate conflict on the Planet as well as to prevent any nation from developing Nuclear Weapons for its own use i.e. a Pan African variant of the Baruch Plan. The AU has an important, nay messianic, role to play in this regard. The Nuclear Arming of Africa has, paradoxically, been the “Missing Variable” in arriving at an effective formula that could lead to the complete Nuclear Disarming of the globe. In view of this and in accordance with Article 6, section (3) of the CA, the Assembly needs to convene in extraordinary session at the earliest possible opportunity to devise the Nuclear Policy of the Union and set in motion its practical implementation. The Executive Council, acting in accordance with its Functions (as set out in Article 13), should then begin the immediate monitoring of the implementation of that Policy. Sections (B) and (I) of that Article dealing with “(nuclear) energy, industry & mineral resources” and “science & technology” respectively are clearly the relevant provisions. Article 14, pertaining to the Establishment and Composition of the Specialised Technical Committees, includes (among others) “The Committee on Industry, Science & Technology, Energy, Natural Resources and Environment”. In keeping with its mandate (set out in Article 15) to “prepare projects and programmes of the Union and submit it to the Executive Council” the aforementioned Technical Committee needs to embark on the necessary research, development and production activities that will take the Pan African Atomic Bomb out of the realm of idle fantasy and into the realm of Being. The 21-member state inter-governmental African Regional Co-operation Agreement for Research, Training & Development related to Nuclear Science & Technology (AFRA) along with the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) – based in South Africa – provide mechanisms through which the Nuclear Scientific Talents and Resources of the AU & Diaspora can be mobilised and institutionalised into a Nuclear Weapons Planning Group (NWPG) tasked with providing the AU with a rudimentary Nuclear Weapons Capability by 2008. Pursuant to Article 17 of the CA these activities will then need to be brought before the Pan African Parliament for approval, with the African Monetary Fund (whose establishment is envisaged in Article 19) providing the financial wherewithal for the realisation of this project. With over 750 million Africans on the continent and some 300 million People of African Descent scattered throughout the Diaspora, the African World boasts a global population of over ONE BILLION PERSONS. If 10% of this populace paid the sum of $20 per month (or 70 cents per day) into the African Union’s Monetary Fund it would yield $2 billion in cash each month and $24 billion in a single year. This sum, coupled with the AU’s mineral & energy resources as collateral, could in turn be leveraged into $100 billion or more per annum. With such resources at its disposal there is little the Union couldn’t accomplish.
India’s Strategic Partnership Accord with South Africa (announced in March 1997) needs to be broadened into an alliance with the AU as a whole – particularly in the Military Nuclear field. A Nuclear Armed Alliance between India and the AU could serve as one of the pillars of a broad Southern Hemispheric Defence Pact. North Korea would also have a critical role to play in such a pact. An ISIS report on the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Effort estimates that, prior to signing the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US (and under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its Nuclear Program), the country was operating a reprocessing plant capable of extracting about 60-70 kilograms per year of Weapon-Grade Plutonium from spent gas-graphite fuel generated by its indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors. If all three reactors (two at Yongbyon & a third, larger reactor at Taechon) had not frozen their activities they would have been producing around 280 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium per annum – enough to make 50-60 Nuclear Weapons each year (at a rate of 5 kilograms of Pu-239 per weapon). By 2007 – the year when the Light Water Reactors (LWR) supplied to the country (to replace the Gas Graphite plants frozen under the Framework) are due to start operating – North Korea would have produced between 1,700 and 2,400 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium, or enough for 350-500 Nuclear Weapons. This would have given the country one of the largest stocks of Weapon-Grade Plutonium and Nuclear Weapons outside of the US & Russia and significantly more than either India or Israel. By 2010, North Korea’s indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors would have produced 2,600-3,500 kilograms of Weapon-Usable Plutonium – enough for a mammoth arsenal of between 500-700 Nuclear Weapons. And this from a country no more industrialised than the AU states of South Africa, Algeria or Egypt. In view of the 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review report identifying North Korea as a potential target for a pre-emptive American nuclear assault, the foregoing ought to underline the importance of developing the strongest possible ties between the AU and Pyongyang aimed at persuading the DPRK to resume the full production of Military Plutonium and joining the Union in an Afro-Korean Strategic Accord. With China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan as partners in the above Indo-Afro-Korean Nuclear Entente, NATO would soon find itself completely eclipsed on the international stage. As Admiral Bierman, the former Commandant General of the South African Defence Forces (SADF), observed in the early 1970’s,“In the final analysis it is a prerequisite for the successful defence of the Southern Hemisphere that the deterrent strategy based on Nuclear Terror and the fear of escalation should also be applicable in the region.” Armed with this truism such a pact would be invincible.
Finally, the AU must demand a Permanent Seat on the UN Security Council or strive – with other nations in the World – for the abolition of this body and its replacement by the more democratic and representative Global Security Executive. It should also lead international efforts to secure a Universal and Legally-Binding Multilateral Agreement – A GLOBAL PELINDABA TREATY – for the total elimination of all Nuclear Weapons on Earth. This must be the price the Union exacts for any forswearing of a Pan African Nuclear Option. The AU must insist that all of the Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) follow in South Africa’s post-Apartheid Nuclear Footsteps through the voluntary “roll back” & complete abolition of their own Nuclear Arsenals if the Union is to renounce its own Nuclear Ambitions. If the United Kingdom, for example, were to follow South Africa’s lead and unilaterally dismantle its Nuclear Weapons Program her action would go down as one of the most significant milestones in the Moral History of the World. For she would be the first of the declared Nuclear Weapon States to have surrendered the Nuclear Option and could serve to inspire a “Reverse Breakout” by the other NWS – namely, a break out of the Nuclear Club and a break into the Non-nuclear World. Of the five leading NWS, the UK and France are the only states the dismantling of whose nuclear arsenals would entail the least financial cost and security risk. Russia, China and the US have all experienced varying degrees of direct nuclear tension and antagonism with each other – whether it be the US vs. Russia or Russia vs. China or China vs. the US – and can thus be said to form a “Strategic Triad” whose security fates are far more directly entwined with one another’s than are those of either France or the UK. By unilaterally “breaking out” of the NWS community these latter two states could set in motion a process that would inspire China, Russia and the US to thrash out a Trilateral Disarmament Agreement between themselves and aimed at the elimination of their own nuclear arsenals. And, far from losing their “status” in the international system all five states would, overnight, establish a new horizon of Moral Leadership in the world the result of which would be to entrench their pre-eminence on the planet. They would speak with enhanced authority in the security affairs of the World as nations that once possessed the power to end life on Earth and that willingly relinquished it. These states would thus be in an unparalleled position – through the establishment of a Joint Defence Force composed of personnel and weaponry from their five Armed Forces – to demand and enforce the non-possession of WMD by would-be proliferators and the US would finally be able to count on universal backing for NMD. Indeed, NMD could itself evolve into a Joint Missile Defence System (JMDS) funded and built by the five (now former) Nuclear Weapon States (and others) along the lines of the International Space Station. At a December 4, 1996 speech to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. General Lee Butler (ret.), former head of the US Strategic Air Command, posed the following question: “Is it possible to forge a global consensus on the propositions that Nuclear Weapons have no defensible role, that the broader consequences of their employment transcend any asserted military utility, and that as true Weapons of Mass Destruction, the case for their elimination is a thousand-fold stronger and more urgent (than) that for deadly Chemicals & Viruses already widely declared immoral, illegitimate, subject to destruction and prohibited from any future production? I am persuaded that such a consensus is not only possible, it is imperative.” The Black Bomb may well represent the world’s final chance to force a positive response to this question out of the NWS before the complete collapse of the NPT and the end of all Order. It needs to be recognised that the arguments advanced by President George W. Bush and his National Security team in support of Missile Defence – to the effect that the 1972 ABM Treaty was a “relic of the past”, ill-suited to the post-9/11 “Strategic Architecture & Threat Setting” of the 21st century – apply with even greater force to the NPT (which predates the ABM treaty by several years) and the infinitely more challenging security environment in which the African Union finds itself. The continent of Africa – in the absence of universal Nuclear Disarmament – has every right to acquire the means with which to secure its member states against any and all potential threats. If the rationale behind the development of Israel’s Nuclear Deterrent was to provide lasting insurance against any repetition of the Nazi Genocide (in which six million Jews were murdered) then the African continent – which lost ONE HUNDRED MILLION souls to the Slave Trade Holocaust – is surely deserving of a Nuclear Arsenal a thousand times larger & more lethal than that of the Jewish State. Barring the total elimination of all Nuclear Weapons throughout the world (through the establishment of a Planetary Nuclear Weapons Free Zone or PNWFZ) the AU must stand ready to withdraw from the NPT – which, by virtue of its entrenchment of a racial asymmetry in the global distribution of Nuclear Weaponry, can only be likened to a form of Nuclear Jim Crow – and become a fully-fledged and unapologetic Nuclear Power. America’s complete and utter contempt for its arms control obligations – be it the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the 1972 ABM Treaty, the NPT & Pelindaba Agreements, the 1997 Convention Against Anti-Personnel Landmines or the 1972 Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) – could one day result in that country finding itself confronted by its Ultimate National Security Nightmare: A “NI**ER” WITH A NUKE.
Forty-five of the fifty-three OAU member states signed Pelindaba at the 1996 Cairo meeting, with abstentions from Madagascar and the Seychelles and the non-participation of Liberia and Somalia due to internal unrest (these four states have all since signed on). In concert with the Treaty of Tlatelolco (which established a NWFZ in Latin America), the Treaty of Bangkok (establishing a NWFZ in South East Asia) and the Treaty of Rarotonga (establishing the same in the Pacific) these agreements effectively ban the manufacture or use of Nuclear Weapons throughout the Southern Hemisphere.
The Pelindaba Treaty bound its signatories not to conduct research on, develop, manufacture, stockpile or otherwise acquire, possess or have control over any Nuclear Explosive Device by any means anywhere; not to seek or receive any assistance in the research on, development, manufacture, stockpiling or acquisition, or possession of any Nuclear Explosive Device; prohibited the stationing of any Nuclear Explosive Device on ANWFZ territory; and prohibited the testing of any Nuclear Explosive Device. It required all States parties to declare any capability for the manufacture of Nuclear Explosive Devices; to dismantle and destroy any Nuclear Explosive Device manufactured prior to the coming into force of the Treaty; to destroy facilities for the manufacture of Nuclear Explosive Devices or, where possible, to convert them to peaceful uses; and to permit the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) to verify the processes of dismantling and destruction of the Nuclear Explosive Devices, as well as the destruction or conversion of the facilities for their production. In addition each party undertook to effectively implement (or to use as guidelines) the measures contained in the Bamako Convention on the Ban of the Import into Africa and Control of Transboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes within Africa in so far as it was relevant to Radioactive Waste; and not to take any action to assist or encourage the dumping of Radioactive Waste and other Radioactive Matter anywhere within the ANWFZ. The parties were also required to conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA for the purpose of verifying compliance with their undertakings and to maintain the highest standards of security and effective physical protection of Nuclear Materials, Facilities and Equipment to prevent theft or unauthorised use and handling. (The IAEA currently applies safeguards to 26 Nuclear Installations in five African Union (AU) member states party to both Pelindaba and the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT), namely Egypt, Ghana, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, South Africa and the DRC, and in one State – Algeria – pursuant to facility-specific agreements.) Finally, each party undertook not to take, assist or encourage any action aimed at an armed attack by conventional or other means against Nuclear Installations in the ANWFZ.
Like the NPT, however, the pact included a provision allowing member states, in exercising their National Sovereignty, to withdraw “IF (THEY) DECIDE THAT EXTRAORDINARY EVENTS, RELATED TO THE SUBJECT MATTER OF THE TREATY, HAVE JEOPARDISED (THEIR) SUPREME INTERESTS.” Four of the (then) five declared Nuclear Weapon States (the US, UK, France and China) signed two Protocols attached to the treaty in which they undertook “not to use or threaten to use a Nuclear Explosive Device against any party to the treaty or any territory within the African NWFZ” and “not to test or assist or encourage the testing of any Nuclear Explosive Device anywhere within the African NWFZ.” And though the White House signed those Protocols it did so with the reservation that neither the Treaty (nor Protocol III therein) applied to the activities of the United Kingdom, the United States or any other state party to it on the island of Diego Garcia (or elsewhere in the British Indian Ocean Territories) and that, accordingly, no change would be required to US Armed Forces operations there. It is for this reason that Russia – the fifth Nuclear State – withheld its own signature.
The ink had barely dried on this agreement when, fifteen days later, the (then) US Defence Secretary William Perry of the Clinton Administration – during an April 26 speech at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama (and in blatant disregard of his country’s NPT & Pelindaba undertakings) – threatened to drop a B61-11 Variable Yield/Earth Penetrating Tactical Nuclear Weapon on a suspected “Chemical Weapons Plant” at Tarhunah, 37 miles southeast of Tripoli in Libya – a treaty member. This followed remarks made by a National Security Council staffer, Bob Bell, during an April 11 White House press briefing at which he stated that the US pledge not to use Nuclear Weapons against a signatory to the Pelindaba Treaty “will not limit options available to the US in response to an attack by an ANWFZ party using Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).” His threats were reinforced later that same month by comments made by the Assistant Secretary of Defence Kenneth Bacon at a Pentagon briefing during which he disclosed that the US was considering a number of options for destroying the alleged Libyan weapons factory which “could require, could include, the use of Nuclear Weapons.”
Coming on the heels of revelations about the activities of white Nuclear Scientists associated with the Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program of South Africa and their efforts to share their know-how with dissident Afrikaner extremist elements (some of whom are suspected of having custody of up to 10 Thermonuclear and Neutron Devices that were never declared and dismantled as part of the post-Apartheid “roll back” of its Nuclear Capability and who remain determined to reverse Black Majority rule) along with the enduring Nuclear Threat to the North African nations of Egypt, Algeria, Libya and the Sudan posed by Israel’s Nuclear Weapons Arsenal – coupled with the US decision to abrogate the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and go forward with the deployment of a global National Missile Defence System or NMD (along with the 2002 Nuclear Posture Review revealing US plans to use Nuclear Weapons against at least one Non-nuclear African state, namely Libya) – it has become abundantly clear that both the NPT and Pelindaba Treaties are themselves now little more than worthless pieces of tissue paper.
These developments clearly pose a direct challenge to the National Security of the African Union (AU) and demand the strongest possible response in both word and deed. To that end the government of South Africa, under the leadership of His Excellency President Thabo Mbeki, should revive the Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program and utilise its Nuclear Materials & Installations along with the Nuclear Scientific talents of the African World (and in conjunction with the Nuclear Establishments of Algeria & Egypt) in order to bring into existence a Pan African Nuclear Deterrent Option – the “BLACK BOMB” – for the collective defence of the AU from what is plainly a clear and present Nuclear Danger to its member states.
Quite apart from the protection this will afford the Union from the aforementioned perils the acquisition of Nuclear Weapons by the AU will transform the International Stature of the continental formation. It will enable Africa to both guarantee its own security from internal threats as well as deter any external US or NATO aggression of the kind to which Libya was subjected in 1986 and the Sudan in 1998. It will give the AU the means to project power and provide a Nuclear Umbrella to the Black Nations of the Caribbean Basin – most of whose peoples are descended from African slaves – thus equipping them with the tools with which to repulse US military adventurism of the type inflicted upon the islands of Grenada and Panama (in 1983 and 1989 respectively). This Nuclear Umbrella will also extend into the US heartland itself to provide existential shelter and security to the forty million African-Americans in that country and ultimately provide a global Nuclear Security Blanket to the world’s one billion Africans. The Black Bomb – Africa’s force de frappe – will place the AU on the road to becoming a genuine Superpower within the International System – indeed, the Fifth of the Great Powers (alongside the US, Russia, China and India), thereby transforming the identity of the African World and boosting the self-esteem of people of African Descent throughout the planet. A Nuclear Armed African Union will alter the very basis of the International System and constitute Africa’s contribution to bridging the global Nuclear Divide and establishing a Nuclear Symmetry between the Southern and Northern Hemispheres (similar to the East-West strategic equilibrium that obtained during the Cold War). This will enhance Global Security. Through the establishment of a Nuclear Armed Quadruple Entente between the AU, Russia, China and India we will effectively checkmate US/NATO expansionism (as it proceeds apace behind the smokescreen of the post-9/11 “War on Terror”), undercut their NMD plans and punish any misadventure by the EU’s Rapid Reaction Force. An African Bomb will help to prevent a Second Holocaust of the kind that Africans endured during the Slavery and Colonial eras and enable us to exact maximum Nuclear Retribution, at a moment’s notice, against any future Imperialist Predators. The Black Bomb Program will constitute the Final Act of the Nuclear Weapons Age, revolutionising the strategic identity and global role of the African continent and forcing into the open the nakedly racist asymmetry and hypocrisy of an international “Non-proliferation” Order that allows some states to possess Nuclear Weapons while denying that right to others. In this way the Atomic Arsenal of the AU will contribute to the creation of a New Global Democracy in which all states are truly equal. What the ISLAMIC BOMB is to the MUSLIM World and the ISRAELI BOMB is to World JEWRY the BLACK BOMB will be to the AFRICAN World.
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The excellent Nuclear Materials and Infrastructure inherited from the Apartheid regime by the Black Majority Government of South Africa – along with the Nuclear Establishments of Algeria and Egypt – provide the African Union with a solid basis for a Pan African “MANHATTAN PROJECT” through which to produce advanced Nuclear Weapons. A 2001 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that the Algerian Nuclear Program had equipped itself with the installations necessary to carry out all of the activities linked to the complete cycle for obtaining Military Grade Plutonium. The Es Salam Nuclear Reactor and associated Hot Cell Laboratory (with an underground channel connecting the two), located near the city of Birine, some 250 kilometres south of Algiers, currently serves as the nerve centre of that country’s Nuclear Program. In 1991, US spy satellites engaged in rigorous photo-reconnaissance operations over North Africa (and undoubtedly acting on a tip-off from Spain’s Higher Centre for Defence Intelligence, or CESID, which operates an extensive spy network throughout the region) are reported to have stumbled across the construction of Nuclear Reactors and associated facilities at this location. The site featured, among other installations, a 15 MW Thermal Heavy Water Reactor purchased from Argentina. A reactor of this size, using Low-Enriched Uranium fuel for irradiation purposes, is capable of producing several kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium per year. In 1984 Algeria purchased 150 tons of Yellowcake (Uranium Ore Concentrate) from Niger for use in its Nuclear Program. The recent discovery of Uranium in the Hoggar region of the country will further reduce Algeria’s future dependence on outside sources for its Nuclear Fuel needs. In 1997 China agreed to provide the country with a Radioisotope Production Laboratory for the production of Cobalt-60 to be sold to other member states of the AU and may supply her with a Heavy Water Production Plant at some point in the future. The Nuclear Plant at Es Salam is capable of producing as much as 6 kilograms of weapon-usable Plutonium per year through either (1) the irradiation of Natural Uranium Targets in the core or (2) increasing the reloads of Low-Enriched Uranium Fuel or (3) a switch to Natural Uranium Fuel. The pressing need to bring a Pan African Atom Bomb into being as soon as possible makes Target Irradiation the preferred option. The Hot Cells could be employed to cut up the fuel or target elements and reprocess some irradiated uranium. The Radioisotope Lab is the place most likely to facilitate the dissolution of the irradiated material and expedite the chemical extraction of the Plutonium. Fabrication of the targets could be carried out at the Fuel Fabrication plant at Draria. In addition, the country looks set to take delivery, at some point in the future, of a number of Silicon Graphics High Performance Computers or HPC’s (8.5 billion theoretical operations per second, by some estimates) essential in the design of Nuclear Warheads and the modelling of the implosive shock waves that detonate them. These machines are also indispensable for the simulation of the aerodynamics of Ballistic Missiles. Between 1960 and 1965 France carried out no less than 14 underground Nuclear Tests at two separate locations in the Algerian desert. With most of these sub-surface sites still intact and a 2000-strong staff of well trained specialists (300 of whom are highly qualified Nuclear Engineers) operating under the aegis of the country’s Nuclear Energy Commission, Algeria’s Nuclear Industrial Complex is poised to form an important part of the African Union’s Nuclear Deterrent Program. Indeed, a July 1998 CESID report to the Madrid Government concluded that, “the knowledge obtained by an impressive staff of experts and scientists, as well as the availability of the installations which it will have at the end of the century, will place the country in an advantageous position to restart a Military Program if the corresponding political decision is taken.” Such a decision, if made, will ensure that the AU won’t be the emasculated international eunuch that its predecessor, the OAU, was.
For its part, South Africa’s former Nuclear Weapons Installations included: the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre (consisting of the Safari-1 20MW Research Reactor, Hot Cell Complex, Aerodynamic Process Enrichment Plant, U3O8-UF6 Conversion Plant, HEU-UF6 Production Plant, MTR Fuel Fabrication Facility & the Thabana Hill/Radiation Hill Waste Disposal site), the Valindaba/Pelindaba East “Y-Plant” Uranium Enrichment Facility & the Advena Central Laboratories/Kentron Circle Facility. Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre was the site at which the first Apartheid Nuclear Device was designed and produced. It was also the location at which the criticality test for the Highly Enriched Uranium (HEU) core of the device was tested. This location included facilities for machining High Explosives for Implosion Weapons and for the related Testing & Firing. Advanced Weapons Design research was also conducted here. The Safari-1 Research Reactor, supplied by the US, was commissioned in 1965 and placed under IAEA safeguards. Over the next ten years the US provided the facility with around 100 kilograms of Weapon Grade Uranium Fuel. These fuel shipments were suspended in 1975 as the Apartheid state steadily came under international sanctions regimes. At present South Africa’s Atomic Energy Corporation (AEC) retains a large inventory of Weapon Grade HEU-235 at this site. The “Y-Plant” at Valindaba/Pelindaba East was the site at which HEU for Nuclear Weapons was produced. It employed a novel aerodynamic process for the separation of the lighter U-235 isotope from the heavier U-238 fraction through the centrifugal effects of spinning Uranium Hexafluoride and Hydrogen gases inside a tube. It is estimated that up to 550 kilograms of HEU was produced at this site. A Molecular Laser Isotope Separation (MLIS) facility was also located here. Advena/Kentron Circle was the location at which the Nuclear Weapons themselves were developed and produced. Advanced Warhead Designs were also researched at this facility. At present this facility has “extensive capabilities in high-speed electronics, theoretical calculations/modelling, metallurgy, environmental & reliability testing and ultra high-speed diagnostics.” Of particular importance to the AU are its capabilities in the design of high explosives that produce shaped shock waves. Taken together (and refurbished where required) these installations comprise the African Union’s LOS ALAMOS. It is here that the Black Bomb will be born.
According to the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) South Africa assigned about 450 kilograms of HEU enriched over 80% to its Apartheid-era Nuclear Weapons Program. Roughly 20-25% was HEU enriched to about 80%; the remainder was enriched to 90-95%. Since the early 1990’s the country has used some 50-70 kilograms of this material to fuel the Safari Research Reactor. The balance, some 400 kilograms of 90%-plus HEU-235 extracted from dismantled weapons, remains at Pelindaba under IAEA safeguards. A 1994 study by the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC) estimating that a country possessing a “low technical capability” could build a 20-Kt Nuclear Device with only 16 kilograms of HEU means that the Fissile Material currently possessed by Thabo Mbeki’s Government is sufficient for the production of 25 Fission-Type NUCLEAR WARHEADS (which, if fabricated with sufficient quantities of Tritium, could boost their explosive yield to 100-Kt – 100,000 tons of TNT or five Nagasaki’s-worth of nuclear explosive power – per weapon) for the African Union’s Nuclear Deterrent Arsenal.
A 1995 report (published in The Nonproliferation Review) by Frank V. Pabian, an official with the US Department of Energy, revealed that US nuclear co-operation with South Africa began in the closing days of World War II with the search for Uranium for the then-secret “Manhattan Project” – America’s effort to build the Atomic Bomb. In 1950, to secure guaranteed supplies of Natural Uranium for their expanding Nuclear Weapons programs, the US and UK signed a purchasing agreement with South Africa that provided the impetus for that country’s development into one of the world’s major Uranium producers. A 1974 South African Government report concluded that US assistance to the country’s nuclear establishment via the so-called “Plowshare Program” made feasible the development of a Nuclear Explosive Device “for peaceful uses”. This “peaceful” program was nevertheless kept under strict secrecy following the adverse international reaction to India’s “peaceful” Nuclear Test in May of that year. The rise of Black Nationalist military resistance to the Apartheid regime during the 1970’s (coupled with increased international isolation as a result of its racist policies) “forced” the South African government to redirect their clandestine “peaceful” Nuclear Program to the development of Nuclear Weapons. At the 31st Session of the UN General Assembly in 1976, African nations made an appeal “to all states not to deliver to South Africa or place at its disposal any equipment or fissionable material or technology that will enable the racist regime of South Africa to acquire a Nuclear Weapon Capability” until it had abandoned its Apartheid policies and acceded to the NPT. In a 1978 memorandum arising from talks between South Africa and the US, the Apartheid regime sought to rationalise its refusal to sign the Treaty by arguing that, “It must be realised that South Africa is threatened by the Soviet Union and its associates and certain African countries with Soviet support and encouragement. South Africa has no hope of any assistance from the UN in case of attack. On the contrary, it is continually being threatened with action under Chapter VII of the Charter of the UN. While this state of affairs continues, South Africa cannot in the interest of its own security sign the NPT and thus set the minds of its would-be attackers at rest, allowing them to proceed freely with their plans against us.”
As a result South Africa, according to Pabian, took the two-fold decision to “establish a completely autonomous once-through Nuclear Fuel Cycle (i.e. no reprocessing) to meet all of the requirements of its Research and Power Reactors and thereby free itself from dependence on unreliable outside supplier states and proceed with a major transformation and expansion of its Nuclear Weapons Program.” This effort was established to include: the production of a number of Gun-Assembled Nuclear Weapons & their associated Air-Drop Delivery Systems; studies of Implosion & Thermonuclear technology and the accompanying Ballistic Missile delivery systems; and research & development for the production of Plutonium, Lithium-6 and Tritium at the Gouriqua site on the Cape Coast. With active Israeli support in (and Western connivance at) South African sanctions-busting efforts, a 1989 article in Engineering Week was able to report that the White Supremacist regime had managed to acquire “an advanced detonics laboratory featuring Flash X-ray Analysis and Ultra-High Speed Photography (up to 20 million frames per second) for recording detonation phenomena” – the imaging equipment necessary to fulfil the requirements of an Implosion-type Nuclear Weapons research & development program. It had also successfully procured a Hot Isostatic Press, useful in “press-forming high explosives into spherical shapes for use in Implosion-type Nuclear Weapons” (as well as indigenously developing a Cold Isostatic Press used to “manufacture the Tungsten Tamper parts for South Africa’s Gun-Assembled Nuclear Weapons”). A 1983 UN study into South Africa’s Nuclear Program noted the supply to the country of Helium-3, described as a material from which “Tritium, an element used in Thermonuclear Weapons, could be derived.” The source of this substance was almost certainly the State of Israel. Other equipment procured by the racist regime included: vibration test equipment (“which could be used to test the reliability of Nuclear Warheads”); multi-channel analyzers (“capable of analysing complex data at a test site”); and a Cyber 170/175 Computer (“powerful enough to model a Nuclear Explosion”). The South Africans also successfully obtained an unclassified US Navy Handbook 255 entitled, “Nuclear Weapons Systems, Safety, Design, and Evaluation, Criteria For” which, again according to Pabian, enabled their weapons designers to “think through and resolve safety problems that might otherwise have been inherent in their own design.” Nevertheless, there were other development and production difficulties that had to be overcome in designing a reliable Gun-Type Device which, according to the ISIS’s David Albright, included: assuring the “repeatability of the projectile velocity; repeatability of symmetry requirements when the projectile is injected; the density of the Neutron Reflectors; the plating of Uranium components with Nickel; and the reliability of the Arming & Safing devices.”
In the fall of 1990, a few months prior to South Africa’s accession to the NPT, a UN committee approved by an overwhelming majority a resolution declaring that country’s Nuclear Capability a “threat to international peace.” Three countries – the US, France & the UK – OPPOSED the resolution, which was adopted in the General Assembly’s main political committee. The aforementioned three countries, with the addition of Israel, again OPPOSED another UN resolution demanding that South Africa submit all of its Nuclear Facilities to IAEA inspection. A final resolution condemning the build-up of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Capability was again RESISTED by the four countries already mentioned, this time with the addition of Liechtenstein. The role that these nations (along with others) are believed to have played, in joint efforts with South Africa, in the procurement of a mysterious substance known as “RED MERCURY 20:20” (as part of the so-called Project Shampoo) during the 1980’s may well have motivated their resistance to international scrutiny of the Apartheid regime’s WMD program. This gel-like polymer (a combination of Pure Mercury & Mercury Antimony Oxide) apparently performs an important function in Pure Fusion Weapons – possibly through the alteration of the Fusion Process itself – to create “clean” explosions (hence the name “shampoo”) and Apartheid South Africa is widely believed to have developed, but never declared, several such weapons.
Having inherited Fissile Material – some 450 kilograms of 90%-plus HEU-235 in Metal Form – from the Apartheid regime (and thus surmounted the main technical hurdle on the road to a Nuclear Explosive Capability) the Black Majority Government of South Africa has been spared many of the R&D efforts described above. All that the AU now needs is to develop or acquire an efficient Warhead Design and the components – Explosive Lenses, Neutron Generators, Tampers, Electronic Firing Circuits, etc. – out of which to assemble several weapons and, providing the HEU is recast and a number of associated technical tasks are completed, Africa will at last have “the Bomb”.
One of history’s lesser-known facts is that a number of Black Nuclear Scientists played central roles in America’s WWII-era “Manhattan Project” – the Los Alamos-based effort that produced the world’s first Atomic Bomb. They include Nuclear Physicists, Chemists and Mathematicians like Lloyd Albert Quaterman, Ernest J. Wilkins, Sidney Thompson, Clarence Turner, Robert J. Omohundro, Sherman Carter, Jasper Jeffries, Benjamin Scott, Ralph Gardner, Harold Evans, Clyde Dillard, Edwin R. Russell, George W. Reed, Moddie D. Taylor and the brothers William J. & Lawrence H. Knox. The Inorganic Chemist Moddie Taylor was based at the University of Chicago and it was his (& his colleagues) role in the Project to demonstrate that a fissionable material could achieve critical mass, thus proving that Nuclear Fission could be used as an energy source – or a weapon. Physicist Lloyd Quaterman was specifically praised by the US Secretary of War for “work essential to the production of the Atomic Bomb, thereby contributing to the successful conclusion of WWII.” The Physicist & Mathematician Ernest J. Wilkins – the “BLACK OPPENHEIMER” – was a member of the Enrico Fermi research team and played a central role in helping to solve the riddle of the atom. ‘Little Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’, the two Atom Bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US Government in 1945, were armed with high-grade Uranium from the Shinkolobwe Mine in the Congo. So central were Black Scientists to the Los Alamos effort that the eminent white physicist Arthur Holly Compton remarked that the Atom Bomb project was unique in bringing together “coloured and white, Christian and Jew” for a common purpose. This observation holds an important lesson for the Pan African “Manhattan Project”. A May 1994 editorial in the New York Times reported that a group of 16 recently laid-off ex-Apartheid Nuclear Scientists had threatened to sell their know-how to the highest bidder unless they received a million-dollar severance package. Some of these disgruntled former members of South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program have, indeed, placed themselves at the disposal of elements in the Afrikaner “Third Force” (believed to include top SADF military officers, former AEC & Armscor officials, National Party politicians and Afrikaner industrialists) who aim to use a form of Nuclear Blackmail, at some future point, to either reverse Black Political Rule in the country as a whole or secure a White Homeland (or Volkstaat) within it. Such aspirations on the part of this population group exceed the bounds of the sheerest folly and represent a woeful waste of their scientific skills. One of the ways in which these Nuclear Specialists could make themselves useful – and, in the process, redeem themselves for having served a vile white supremacist regime – is by placing their talents at the disposal of the AU and playing their part in the development of the PAN AFRICAN ATOMIC BOMB. In this way they will not only realise their full potential as Nuclear Weapon Scientists but they will also prove to the rest of the continent that they really are “every bit as African as any Black Man”.
On 24 March 1993 the then-Apartheid government of F.W. De Klerk announced to the world that South Africa had built, and then dismantled, seven “Gun-Type” Nuclear Devices. The haste with which his regime decided to cancel its Nuclear Weapons Program in 1991, sign the NPT and accept IAEA safeguards was, in the words of an ex-diplomat associated with that administration, “motivated by concern that it didn’t want any undeclared Nuclear Material or Infrastructure falling into the hands of Nelson Mandela and the ANC.” This paranoia was shared by both the US and British Governments which offered to buy up South Africa’s inventory of Weapon Grade Uranium before Mandela came to power – thus underlining the fear and dread with which they viewed the prospect of a NUCLEAR ARMED BLACK AFRICA. (Indeed, disturbing evidence of what appears to be a systematic effort to keep nuclear know-how out of Black Hands has emerged over the years. In 1970 a Black American Plasma Physics specialist based at the University of Kinshasa (then Lovanium University) – and engaged in an effort to train Congolese scientists in how to take full advantage of their Belgian-built Nuclear Reactor – was dismissed from his teaching post on the grounds that he didn’t speak French well enough. More recently, the November 25, 1997 issue of South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper reported that a Black South African Radiation Physicist, Mojalefa Murphy, had been fired as Executive General Manager of the South African Atomic Energy Corporation’s (AEC) Corporate External Relations for allegedly failing to submit proof of all credit-card expenses and failing to follow proper procedure in dismissing an employee. The following year, the June 26 issue of the same newspaper reported that yet another top Nuclear Physicist, Zimbabwe-born Marcel Dube – Executive General Manager of Technical Services and the only Black member of the AEC board – had also been expelled from the organisation after being accused of fraudulently obtaining South African citizenship. As the custodian of South Africa’s inventory of HEU-235 it is clear that the AEC’s white management feel that “the Blacks” are getting “too close for comfort” to the building blocks of a Nuclear Weapon Capability.) South Africa has since faced shrill demands that she “blend down” her current stocks of HEU with Natural or Depleted Uranium to produce Low Enriched Uranium (LEU). To its eternal credit the Mandela Government resisted these noisy ravings and its Safari-1 Research Reactor continues to be powered by Weapon-Grade HEU-235 material. The successor (and current) administration of President Thabo Mbeki should stand ready to seize this material – along with the AEC’s HEU inventory – and make it available for the fabrication of the Pan African Atomic Bomb.
Furthermore, the time has now come for the AU to locate Africa’s equivalent of America’s J. Robert Oppenheimer, Israel’s Ernst David Bergmann, Pakistan’s Abdul Qadeer Khan, Iraq’s Jaffar Dhia Jaffar and the other great Warrior-Scientists of our time and embark upon the assembly of the scientific talents and resources that will comprise the Pan African “Manhattan Project”. It will be the task of these men and women to give Africa the Bomb – no matter what the cost.
The African World does, indeed, boast a number of exceptional scientific minds whose skills are directly applicable to such an undertaking. The University of Michigan’s Dr. Philip Emeagwali, a Nigerian-born Computer Scientist and winner of the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize (which recognises significant achievements in the application of Supercomputers to Scientific and Engineering Problems), programmed the Cray Connection Machine – a massively parallel, single-instruction, multiple-data system – to execute 3.1 billion calculations per second using 65,536 one-bit 32Kbyte processors. His feat represented a breakthrough in the world’s understanding of the capabilities of High Performance Computers (HPC’s). The role of HPC’s in simulating the conditions within an exploding Nuclear Warhead (useful in the maintenance, refinement and development of Nuclear Weapons without the need for the sorts of tests prohibited under the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty or CTBT) and Dr. Emeagwali’s undoubted abilities in the “scaling up” of basic HPC’s to higher speeds (through the networking of these machines to perform parallel, simultaneous computation) make his talents of immense value to the AU’s Nuclear Deterrent Program. The task of African supercomputer scientists like Dr. Emeagwali will be to develop within Africa the indigenous computing power and capability to simulate a Nuclear Weapon’s explosion in Three Dimensions. This will, among other things, enable the AU to improve its weapon designs (through the utilisation of MCNPT-, DOT3.5- and NJOYC-type computer codes), refine its warhead packaging & primary-to-secondary coupling concepts and eventually give the AU the ability to develop W88-like miniaturised, tapered Thermonuclear Warheads.
A 1994 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reported that the South African Uranium Enrichment process utilised “an aerodynamic technique similar to a stationary wall centrifuge. Uranium Hexafluoride and Hydrogen Gas spin inside a small stationary tube. The centrifugal effect created by the rapid spinning causes the Uranium Separation. The mixture enters at high speed through holes in the side of the tube and spirals towards the end of the tube. When the mixture reaches the holes at the end of the tube, the radius of curvature is reduced several-fold, significantly increasing the separation of Uranium Isotopes. The heavy fraction, containing more U-238, exits to the side. The lighter fraction, which contains more U-235, exits straight out the end.” It will fall to the AU’s Nuclear Engineers to develop this process (along with the Gas Centrifuge, Thermal/Gaseous Diffusion, EMIS, Chemical/Ion Exchange and Laser Isotope Separation – both AVLIS & MLIS – methods) for the production of Fissile Material for the Black Bomb.
In addition to the Algerian and South African Nuclear Establishments already described Egypt, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) all have Teaching Nuclear Reactors. The DRC has had a Belgian-built Nuclear Reactor at the University of Kinshasa (and operated under the leadership of Professor Malu wa Kalenga) for over 30 years. It is currently managed by Nuclear Science Professor Butsana bu Niungu, head of the university’s Physics Department. There are over a dozen Kenyans presently working in the US and EU who are trained in the managing of Nuclear Power Plants. The Radiation Protection Board of Kenya, inaugurated in 1982 under the founding chairmanship of Ambassador Thomas Ogada, has plans to acquire a Teaching Nuclear Reactor to supplement the Nuclear Chemistry and Nuclear Science departments at the University of Nairobi. Egypt acquired its first 2MW Research Reactor from the Soviet Union in 1961. Opened by President Gamal Abdel-Nasser at Inchass in the Nile Delta, it was followed in 1992 with the purchase of an Argentine 22MW Nuclear Reactor the construction of which was completed in 1998. According to the project supervisor (and Deputy Chairman of the Egyptian Atomic Energy Authority), Mr Ibrahim El-Dakhli, the new reactor is to be used to produce Radioactive Isotopes and Cobalt-60 for use in medical treatment. And a September 2000 article in Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reported that a series of top-level meetings involving Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and Argentina’s President Fernando De La Rua (and at least six Zimbabwean cabinet ministers) had taken place that year and at which plans for a super Nuclear Reactor to be built in Zimbabwe by INVAP, an Argentine Nuclear Technology company, had been thrashed out. At the meetings INVAP had put a proposal to the Zimbabwean Government in which it was suggested that the country begin with a modest Research Facility and then build up to a much larger Power Generating Reactor. These proposals were the outcome of a 1999 official visit to Argentina by President Mugabe during which the possibility of “South-South” Nuclear Co-operation was discussed with the Argentine President at Government House in Buenos Aires. The proposed reactor would be Africa’s largest and would be designed to address Zimbabwe’s acute electricity needs. This visit was followed by a series of meetings in Harare between the Argentine Ambassador Enrique Pareja and senior Zimbabwean government officials and at which the INVAP proposal was formally submitted. Such a development, if consummated, would make Zimbabwe (along with all of the other national programs detailed above) an important piece in Africa’s emerging Nuclear Jigsaw. With over 30,000 African PhD-holders living outside of the AU – many with degrees in Nuclear Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Computer Science, Engineering and Metallurgy – along with an abundance of technocratic & managerial talent in the field of Nuclear Energy scattered throughout the billion-strong African World, the Union is more than adequately endowed with the human, industrial and natural resources it requires to become a global Military Nuclear Power by 2008. All that is lacking is the corresponding Political Will and Strategic Imagination on the part of Africa’s so-called “leaders”.
The African continent, comprising a landmass of 19 million square miles and capable of accommodating the United States of America, Western & Central Europe, India, China, Argentina and New Zealand within its confines, was geologically born over 3 billion years ago. The first Bipedal Hominids (creatures that walk on Two Feet) came into existence and evolved into Human Beings in this territory. From there they migrated to other parts of the World. Traditionally seen as a repository of significant Metallic Mineral Resources – the continent is also an Oil & Natural Gas Powerhouse in its own right. According to a 1999 report prepared by the Centre for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Africa presently accounts for nearly 10% of the world’s supply of petroleum, with the US dependent on her for over 15% of all of its annual oil imports. This figure is set to rise to nearly 25% by the year 2005 and this will make Africa’s oil supply to America STRATEGIC in its importance. With proven oil reserves of over 75 billion barrels in 2000 and estimated reserves of as many as 200 billion barrels, if not more, the African Union will be responsible for providing one out of every four new barrels of oil to come on stream outside of the Persian Gulf states) in the next four years. The decline of Europe’s North Sea production will enhance the significance of the African continent’s “Black Gold” as the US seeks to reduce its reliance on unstable Middle Eastern sources. America’s $10 billion of direct investment in Africa’s petroleum sector exceeds its stake in either Latin America, Eastern Europe, Central Asia (including the Caspian Sea region) & the Middle East. US firms are projected to invest as much as $50 billion in regional exploration and production this decade as they greedily eye-up the TRILLIONS of dollars in revenues to be had from the exploitation of her energy resources. The African continent has vast potential in natural gas production, liquefied natural gas, refining, petrochemicals, electricity production and nuclear energy. Most of this potential is to be found in the states presently known as Nigeria, Angola, Gabon, Algeria, Cameroon, Sudan, Congo, DRC, Chad, Uganda and Equatorial Guinea but includes many other states across the continent. The recent discoveries of billion barrel oil deposits in both Sudan and Uganda, in particular, could indicate that many sub-Saharan African nations – Zambia, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Malawi, South Africa et al – may well be sitting atop a Caspian Sea-style Oil & Natural Gas Bonanza without realising it. In addition, the AU’s virtual monopoly of the world’s most Strategic Minerals – Chromium, Manganese, Vanadium and the Platinum-group Metals – provide her with immense leverage in a world where the proliferation of WMD has become the principal security threat the West seeks to contain. As a single state, Africa would easily surpass the United States of America as the most powerful country on Earth. As a Nuclear Armed African Union (and one that included the Black Nations of the Caribbean Basin as member states) it has the potential to become the greatest of history’s Great Powers.
In order to realise this potential the AU must demand the immediate conversion of its $350 billion External Debt to the West into a Reparations “Write Off” – a deduction of that sum from the $300 TRILLION they owe to Africa in Slavery and Colonialism Reparations (calculated at a rate of $100 Trillion in compensation for the One Hundred Million victims of the Middle Passage Holocaust – or $1 million per victim, a further $100 Trillion in compensation to the descendants of New World Slaves for 350 years of unpaid labour and a final $100 Trillion for the descendants of those Africans who endured the murderous rule & plunder of the European during his “Scramble for Africa” and subsequent colonial rule of the continent). This will leave the West owing a modest $299.65 TRILLION to the continent and its people. The US and EU’s point-blank refusal to pay full Reparations to Africa for these Holocausts (and for which they are entirely responsible) coupled with the ruthless enforcement of the aforementioned crippling Debt Burden – along with the callous prevarication over the provision of affordable HIV/AIDS medication to the utterly devastated peoples of Africa – can only be construed as a cold-blooded and premeditated GENOCIDAL SCHEME against an entire race – one whose people are effectively being subjected to a continent-wide equivalent of the 1994 Rwanda Holocaust. With the US dependent on the AU for 15% of its annual petroleum needs, an African-led OIL EMBARGO of that country & the EU (if carried out in concert with non-African OPEC member states) could bring the economies of those two entities to their knees in a matter of weeks.
On the 22nd of September 1979, an orbiting US Vela meteorological satellite detected a brief, intense double flash of light near South Africa’s Prince Edward Islands. Code-named Operation Phenix/Phoenix, this joint Israeli-South African Neutron Bomb Test has now been confirmed in a recently declassified, but heavily redacted, study titled “Low Yield Nuclear Explosion Calculations: The 9/22/79 Vela Signal” (originally published in 1982). Evidence has long since emerged that Israel provided the Apartheid regime with 30 grams of Tritium (to enhance the explosive power of its warheads) in return for 600 metric tonnes of Yellowcake for its Nuclear Plant at Dimona. The AU’s leadership needs to make it plain to the US and EU that their attempts to sabotage the pre-9/11 UN World Conference Against Racism (held in Durban, South Africa one week before the spectacular, paradigm-shifting al-Qa’ida Airborne Attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon) and subvert the payment of full Reparations to the African and Diaspora descendants of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism Holocausts will result in their awakening one morning to the CNN “Breaking News” announcement that another ‘Alert 747/Vela 6911’ satellite incident has occurred. Only this time the burst of radiance in the South Atlantic will have resulted from a joint Afro-Iranian Nuclear Test.
Article 3, section (M) of the Constitutive Act (CA) of the African Union aims, as one of its objectives, to “advance the development of the continent by promoting research in all fields, in particular in science and technology”. To this end scientific co-operation with Iran, India, China and others in the Civilian and Military Applications of Nuclear Energy should be aggressively pursued with the aim of producing a Pan African Nuclear Deterrent at the earliest possible date. Article 4, section (D) of the CA calls for the “establishment of a common defence policy for the African Continent”. To realise this objective the AU needs to establish an African Crisis Response Force (ACRF) – a million-strong, hi-tech army of reproductively-cloned Nuclear Armed African Warriors, as it were – for the collective defence of the AU’s member states from internal and external threats. A Nuclear Weapons Capability should form an integral part of the Union’s Defence Posture. Article 4, section (H) provides for “the right of the Union to intervene in a Member State pursuant to a decision of the Assembly in respect of grave circumstances, namely: war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity” and section (J) allows for “the right of Member States to request intervention from the Union in order to restore peace and security.” Both of these provisions open the way for the AU to pioneer a Nuclear Policy that could serve as a model for the rest of the world, namely, the use of a Pan African Nuclear Capability as a deterrent to intra-state and inter-state conflict. If a central authority within Africa can successfully utilise Nuclear Weapons to deter Africans from fighting and killing other Africans the international community will have found a workable model for the way in which the Nuclear Arsenals of the world’s Nuclear Powers could be surrendered to a single Global Authority which would alone have the right to employ Nuclear Weapons on Planet Earth. This Global Authority – the Global Security Executive – would use the threat of Nuclear Force to deter intrastate and interstate conflict on the Planet as well as to prevent any nation from developing Nuclear Weapons for its own use i.e. a Pan African variant of the Baruch Plan. The AU has an important, nay messianic, role to play in this regard. The Nuclear Arming of Africa has, paradoxically, been the “Missing Variable” in arriving at an effective formula that could lead to the complete Nuclear Disarming of the globe. In view of this and in accordance with Article 6, section (3) of the CA, the Assembly needs to convene in extraordinary session at the earliest possible opportunity to devise the Nuclear Policy of the Union and set in motion its practical implementation. The Executive Council, acting in accordance with its Functions (as set out in Article 13), should then begin the immediate monitoring of the implementation of that Policy. Sections (B) and (I) of that Article dealing with “(nuclear) energy, industry & mineral resources” and “science & technology” respectively are clearly the relevant provisions. Article 14, pertaining to the Establishment and Composition of the Specialised Technical Committees, includes (among others) “The Committee on Industry, Science & Technology, Energy, Natural Resources and Environment”. In keeping with its mandate (set out in Article 15) to “prepare projects and programmes of the Union and submit it to the Executive Council” the aforementioned Technical Committee needs to embark on the necessary research, development and production activities that will take the Pan African Atomic Bomb out of the realm of idle fantasy and into the realm of Being. The 21-member state inter-governmental African Regional Co-operation Agreement for Research, Training & Development related to Nuclear Science & Technology (AFRA) along with the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE) – based in South Africa – provide mechanisms through which the Nuclear Scientific Talents and Resources of the AU & Diaspora can be mobilised and institutionalised into a Nuclear Weapons Planning Group (NWPG) tasked with providing the AU with a rudimentary Nuclear Weapons Capability by 2008. Pursuant to Article 17 of the CA these activities will then need to be brought before the Pan African Parliament for approval, with the African Monetary Fund (whose establishment is envisaged in Article 19) providing the financial wherewithal for the realisation of this project. With over 750 million Africans on the continent and some 300 million People of African Descent scattered throughout the Diaspora, the African World boasts a global population of over ONE BILLION PERSONS. If 10% of this populace paid the sum of $20 per month (or 70 cents per day) into the African Union’s Monetary Fund it would yield $2 billion in cash each month and $24 billion in a single year. This sum, coupled with the AU’s mineral & energy resources as collateral, could in turn be leveraged into $100 billion or more per annum. With such resources at its disposal there is little the Union couldn’t accomplish.
India’s Strategic Partnership Accord with South Africa (announced in March 1997) needs to be broadened into an alliance with the AU as a whole – particularly in the Military Nuclear field. A Nuclear Armed Alliance between India and the AU could serve as one of the pillars of a broad Southern Hemispheric Defence Pact. North Korea would also have a critical role to play in such a pact. An ISIS report on the North Korean Nuclear Weapons Effort estimates that, prior to signing the 1994 Agreed Framework with the US (and under which Pyongyang agreed to freeze its Nuclear Program), the country was operating a reprocessing plant capable of extracting about 60-70 kilograms per year of Weapon-Grade Plutonium from spent gas-graphite fuel generated by its indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors. If all three reactors (two at Yongbyon & a third, larger reactor at Taechon) had not frozen their activities they would have been producing around 280 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium per annum – enough to make 50-60 Nuclear Weapons each year (at a rate of 5 kilograms of Pu-239 per weapon). By 2007 – the year when the Light Water Reactors (LWR) supplied to the country (to replace the Gas Graphite plants frozen under the Framework) are due to start operating – North Korea would have produced between 1,700 and 2,400 kilograms of Weapon-Grade Plutonium, or enough for 350-500 Nuclear Weapons. This would have given the country one of the largest stocks of Weapon-Grade Plutonium and Nuclear Weapons outside of the US & Russia and significantly more than either India or Israel. By 2010, North Korea’s indigenously-built Gas Graphite Reactors would have produced 2,600-3,500 kilograms of Weapon-Usable Plutonium – enough for a mammoth arsenal of between 500-700 Nuclear Weapons. And this from a country no more industrialised than the AU states of South Africa, Algeria or Egypt. In view of the 2002 US Nuclear Posture Review report identifying North Korea as a potential target for a pre-emptive American nuclear assault, the foregoing ought to underline the importance of developing the strongest possible ties between the AU and Pyongyang aimed at persuading the DPRK to resume the full production of Military Plutonium and joining the Union in an Afro-Korean Strategic Accord. With China, Russia, Iran and Pakistan as partners in the above Indo-Afro-Korean Nuclear Entente, NATO would soon find itself completely eclipsed on the international stage. As Admiral Bierman, the former Commandant General of the South African Defence Forces (SADF), observed in the early 1970’s,“In the final analysis it is a prerequisite for the successful defence of the Southern Hemisphere that the deterrent strategy based on Nuclear Terror and the fear of escalation should also be applicable in the region.” Armed with this truism such a pact would be invincible.
Finally, the AU must demand a Permanent Seat on the UN Security Council or strive – with other nations in the World – for the abolition of this body and its replacement by the more democratic and representative Global Security Executive. It should also lead international efforts to secure a Universal and Legally-Binding Multilateral Agreement – A GLOBAL PELINDABA TREATY – for the total elimination of all Nuclear Weapons on Earth. This must be the price the Union exacts for any forswearing of a Pan African Nuclear Option. The AU must insist that all of the Nuclear Weapon States (NWS) follow in South Africa’s post-Apartheid Nuclear Footsteps through the voluntary “roll back” & complete abolition of their own Nuclear Arsenals if the Union is to renounce its own Nuclear Ambitions. If the United Kingdom, for example, were to follow South Africa’s lead and unilaterally dismantle its Nuclear Weapons Program her action would go down as one of the most significant milestones in the Moral History of the World. For she would be the first of the declared Nuclear Weapon States to have surrendered the Nuclear Option and could serve to inspire a “Reverse Breakout” by the other NWS – namely, a break out of the Nuclear Club and a break into the Non-nuclear World. Of the five leading NWS, the UK and France are the only states the dismantling of whose nuclear arsenals would entail the least financial cost and security risk. Russia, China and the US have all experienced varying degrees of direct nuclear tension and antagonism with each other – whether it be the US vs. Russia or Russia vs. China or China vs. the US – and can thus be said to form a “Strategic Triad” whose security fates are far more directly entwined with one another’s than are those of either France or the UK. By unilaterally “breaking out” of the NWS community these latter two states could set in motion a process that would inspire China, Russia and the US to thrash out a Trilateral Disarmament Agreement between themselves and aimed at the elimination of their own nuclear arsenals. And, far from losing their “status” in the international system all five states would, overnight, establish a new horizon of Moral Leadership in the world the result of which would be to entrench their pre-eminence on the planet. They would speak with enhanced authority in the security affairs of the World as nations that once possessed the power to end life on Earth and that willingly relinquished it. These states would thus be in an unparalleled position – through the establishment of a Joint Defence Force composed of personnel and weaponry from their five Armed Forces – to demand and enforce the non-possession of WMD by would-be proliferators and the US would finally be able to count on universal backing for NMD. Indeed, NMD could itself evolve into a Joint Missile Defence System (JMDS) funded and built by the five (now former) Nuclear Weapon States (and others) along the lines of the International Space Station. At a December 4, 1996 speech to the National Press Club in Washington D.C. General Lee Butler (ret.), former head of the US Strategic Air Command, posed the following question: “Is it possible to forge a global consensus on the propositions that Nuclear Weapons have no defensible role, that the broader consequences of their employment transcend any asserted military utility, and that as true Weapons of Mass Destruction, the case for their elimination is a thousand-fold stronger and more urgent (than) that for deadly Chemicals & Viruses already widely declared immoral, illegitimate, subject to destruction and prohibited from any future production? I am persuaded that such a consensus is not only possible, it is imperative.” The Black Bomb may well represent the world’s final chance to force a positive response to this question out of the NWS before the complete collapse of the NPT and the end of all Order. It needs to be recognised that the arguments advanced by President George W. Bush and his National Security team in support of Missile Defence – to the effect that the 1972 ABM Treaty was a “relic of the past”, ill-suited to the post-9/11 “Strategic Architecture & Threat Setting” of the 21st century – apply with even greater force to the NPT (which predates the ABM treaty by several years) and the infinitely more challenging security environment in which the African Union finds itself. The continent of Africa – in the absence of universal Nuclear Disarmament – has every right to acquire the means with which to secure its member states against any and all potential threats. If the rationale behind the development of Israel’s Nuclear Deterrent was to provide lasting insurance against any repetition of the Nazi Genocide (in which six million Jews were murdered) then the African continent – which lost ONE HUNDRED MILLION souls to the Slave Trade Holocaust – is surely deserving of a Nuclear Arsenal a thousand times larger & more lethal than that of the Jewish State. Barring the total elimination of all Nuclear Weapons throughout the world (through the establishment of a Planetary Nuclear Weapons Free Zone or PNWFZ) the AU must stand ready to withdraw from the NPT – which, by virtue of its entrenchment of a racial asymmetry in the global distribution of Nuclear Weaponry, can only be likened to a form of Nuclear Jim Crow – and become a fully-fledged and unapologetic Nuclear Power. America’s complete and utter contempt for its arms control obligations – be it the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), the 1972 ABM Treaty, the NPT & Pelindaba Agreements, the 1997 Convention Against Anti-Personnel Landmines or the 1972 Biological & Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) – could one day result in that country finding itself confronted by its Ultimate National Security Nightmare: A “NI**ER” WITH A NUKE.
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On the late evening of 15 April and early morning of 16 April 1986 the US Government, under the code name Operation El Dorado Canyon, launched no less than 100 attack and support aircraft at Libya in the most blatant and criminal act of aggression against a member state of the (then) OAU in that organisation’s history. The timing of the attack was designed to ensure that while some of the strike aircraft were still airborne the (then) US President Ronald Reagan was able to go on television and spew the most vicious lies to justify this crime as one of self defence “…consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter.” Reagan claimed that the assault was prompted by “irrefutable proof” that Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi had directed the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque nine days earlier in which one American had died and over 200 had been injured. This vile American thug further alleged that US intelligence had “intercepted” a message from the Libyan leader in which an attack designed “to cause maximum and indiscriminate casualties” had been authorised. The US-led attacks struck the Aziziyah Barracks, Side Bilal base, military facilities at Tripoli’s main airport, Jamahiriyah Military Barracks in Benghazi and the Benina Air Base southeast of Benghazi (among other sites). The French Embassy was also “inadvertently” struck. The US employed two aircraft carriers, the America and the Coral Sea, in these attacks. The United Kingdom, for its part, permitted US EF-111 aircraft stationed at its airbases to participate in the operation but the French refusal to grant the planes over-flight rights increased their mission distance by 1300 nautical miles each way and added 7 hours to their flight time. The strike package included 28 KC-10 & KC-135 tankers, 5 EF-111 Raven ECM (Electronic Countermeasure) aircraft, 24 FB-111 strike aircraft, 14 A-6E’s, 12 A-7E & F/A-18’s, several F-14 Tomcats, 4 E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Command, Control & Warning aircraft and several helicopters deployed for possible search and rescue missions. All told the whole operation was said to have involved “more aircraft and combat ships than Britain employed during its entire campaign in the Falklands.” Over sixty tons of ordinance was unleashed during the operation. Well over 100 Libyans were butchered as a result – including Col. Qadhafi’s adopted daughter. It was Africa’s Pearl Harbour – our very own 9/11.
IN VIEW OF THE MARCH 2002 LOS ANGELES TIMES REPORT (CONCERNING THE AFOREMENTIONED “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW”) WHICH REVEALED THAT THE US HAS TARGETED THE LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA FOR A NUCLEAR STRIKE IN THE EVENT OF AN “IMMEDIATE, POTENTIAL OR UNEXPECTED CONTINGENCY” THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE AU MUST – AS A MATTER OF THE UTMOST URGENCY – BRING INTO BEING A CREDIBLE PAN AFRICAN NUCLEAR DETERRENT SUCH THAT, WERE THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION & ITS COWARDLY “WAR ON TERROR” ALLIES TO UNDERTAKE SUCH AN OPERATION AGAINST THAT NATION (OR ANY OTHER MEMBER STATE OF THE UNION), THEY WOULD FIND A SURPRISE BRIGHTER THAN THE AFRICAN SUN LYING IN WAIT.
~ XYBORG
(Originally published in August 2001 and later updated to its present/final form in March 2002.)
On the late evening of 15 April and early morning of 16 April 1986 the US Government, under the code name Operation El Dorado Canyon, launched no less than 100 attack and support aircraft at Libya in the most blatant and criminal act of aggression against a member state of the (then) OAU in that organisation’s history. The timing of the attack was designed to ensure that while some of the strike aircraft were still airborne the (then) US President Ronald Reagan was able to go on television and spew the most vicious lies to justify this crime as one of self defence “…consistent with Article 51 of the UN Charter.” Reagan claimed that the assault was prompted by “irrefutable proof” that Col. Muammar al-Qadhafi had directed the terrorist bombing of a West Berlin discotheque nine days earlier in which one American had died and over 200 had been injured. This vile American thug further alleged that US intelligence had “intercepted” a message from the Libyan leader in which an attack designed “to cause maximum and indiscriminate casualties” had been authorised. The US-led attacks struck the Aziziyah Barracks, Side Bilal base, military facilities at Tripoli’s main airport, Jamahiriyah Military Barracks in Benghazi and the Benina Air Base southeast of Benghazi (among other sites). The French Embassy was also “inadvertently” struck. The US employed two aircraft carriers, the America and the Coral Sea, in these attacks. The United Kingdom, for its part, permitted US EF-111 aircraft stationed at its airbases to participate in the operation but the French refusal to grant the planes over-flight rights increased their mission distance by 1300 nautical miles each way and added 7 hours to their flight time. The strike package included 28 KC-10 & KC-135 tankers, 5 EF-111 Raven ECM (Electronic Countermeasure) aircraft, 24 FB-111 strike aircraft, 14 A-6E’s, 12 A-7E & F/A-18’s, several F-14 Tomcats, 4 E-2C Hawkeye Airborne Command, Control & Warning aircraft and several helicopters deployed for possible search and rescue missions. All told the whole operation was said to have involved “more aircraft and combat ships than Britain employed during its entire campaign in the Falklands.” Over sixty tons of ordinance was unleashed during the operation. Well over 100 Libyans were butchered as a result – including Col. Qadhafi’s adopted daughter. It was Africa’s Pearl Harbour – our very own 9/11.
IN VIEW OF THE MARCH 2002 LOS ANGELES TIMES REPORT (CONCERNING THE AFOREMENTIONED “NUCLEAR POSTURE REVIEW”) WHICH REVEALED THAT THE US HAS TARGETED THE LIBYAN ARAB JAMAHIRIYA FOR A NUCLEAR STRIKE IN THE EVENT OF AN “IMMEDIATE, POTENTIAL OR UNEXPECTED CONTINGENCY” THE EXECUTIVE COUNCIL OF THE AU MUST – AS A MATTER OF THE UTMOST URGENCY – BRING INTO BEING A CREDIBLE PAN AFRICAN NUCLEAR DETERRENT SUCH THAT, WERE THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION & ITS COWARDLY “WAR ON TERROR” ALLIES TO UNDERTAKE SUCH AN OPERATION AGAINST THAT NATION (OR ANY OTHER MEMBER STATE OF THE UNION), THEY WOULD FIND A SURPRISE BRIGHTER THAN THE AFRICAN SUN LYING IN WAIT.
~ XYBORG
(Originally published in August 2001 and later updated to its present/final form in March 2002.)
