Jerusalem, May 25: The Israeli President, Shimon Peres, discussed selling nuclear warheads to apartheid South Africa when he was defence minister in the 1970s, according to ground-breaking claims in a new book.
Secret South African documents show that Mr Peres met his counterpart, PW Botha, in 1975, when they discussed the sale of Jericho missiles to South Africa. The South Africans understood that Israel was offering to fit the missiles with nuclear warheads, US researcher Sasha Polakow-Suransky claims in his book The Unspoken Alliance.
The allegations, which were denied by Israel yesterday, are embarrassing for Mr Peres, a Nobel Peace prize winner, and have thrust unwelcome attention on Israel’s nuclear weapons programme, the existence of which it has long refused to confirm.
–Agencies