BIG READ: When the worlds of the living and dead converge

It really didn’t look like much: an average-sized missile designed to be slung under the left wing of an outmoded 1960s-era Bucaneer bomber — but it was in fact apartheid SA’s first undeclared nuclear weapon, built into a Raptor glide-bomb, and it could deliver a whopping 20 kiloton punch.

The country had initiated a “peaceful nuclear explosives” (PNE) programme in 1971, under the control of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), with a uranium-enrichment programme at a new plant called Valindaba in the hills south of the Hartebeesport Dam to supply fissile material for the devices.

The design of the devices was of a “gun-type” layout in which a highly enriched uranium projectile is fired at high speed into a highly enriched uranium core, the intense collision shocking the uranium into a nuclear detonation, supposedly useful for digging mines and harbours.

Yet, forebodingly, the gun-type format was also the design of the about 15 kiloton “Little Boy” weapon dropped on Hiroshima 80 years ago this month, on August 8 1945, incinerating 100,000 people in a single, blinding blast.

SA’s first demo PNE model, a hugely cumbersome device 4.44m in length, with a diameter of 61cm, and a total mass, including its steel casing, of 3.45 tonnes, designed not to go critical but merely demonstrate the precision of its electromechanical components, was produced in 1977 by civilian scientists of the CSIR and Atomic Energy Board (AEB).

Preparations for a nonexplosive “cold test” of a second, smaller PNE, at the remote farm of Vastrap in the Kalahari Desert where two deep test shafts had been dug, were blown by Soviet spy Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, who had used his post as SA Defence Force (SADF) liaison to state armaments firm Armscor to secretly photograph Vastrap.

Russian and US surveillance satellites had scoped out Vastrap in July 1977 and it had been photographed on August 14 by a low-flying, presumably US, spy-plane. Panicked, the AEB cancelled the cold test, though a successful cold test was secretly conducted the next year at Somchem in Somerset West, according to former AEB nuclear physicist Nic von Wielligh in his 2015 book, The Bomb.

On October 31 1978, the bellicose new prime minister PW Botha ordered the project transferred to exclusive military control under the SADF and Armscor; renamed Project Festival (later Project Accabo), it developed a “300 Series” of preproduction models and subsystems (numbered 301 to 309) that were used for thermal, flight and other tests.

In the interim, the famous telltale double-flash of a nuclear detonation in the vicinity of SA’s far southern oceanic Prince Edward Islands possessions, detected by the US Vela satellite at 42 seconds past 4.53am on September 22 1979, appears by all the scientific data and coinciding evidence to have been a secret three kiloton Israeli nuclear test, with the SADF as a mere facilitating and keenly observing partner — though Von Wielligh and his colleagues all plead ignorance of any SA involvement.

The scientific evidence includes:

• The signature double-flash light-intensity reading of the bhangmeters on board Vela 6911 — one of a series of Vela satellites monitoring compliance with the Limited Test Ban Treaty.
• The detection by the radio-astronomy observatory at Arecibo in Puerto Rico at the same time as the twin flash of an anomalous ionospheric wave consistent with a nuclear detonation, a finding that aligns neatly with seismic data from New Zealand and ocean wave and hydro-acoustic data analysed by the US Naval Research Laboratory.
• The low levels of iodine-131, a short-lived radioactive product of nuclear fission, found shortly afterwards in sheep in the Australian states of Victoria and Tasmania, downwind of the incident site.

Respected investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims in his 1991 book on the Israeli nuclear programme, The Samson Option, that, according to Israeli officials, the Vela incident was the third joint Israeli-SA test in the South Atlantic; Hersh wrote that the actual warhead tested was a low-yield artillery shell, in other words, a miniaturised, tactical battlefield nuke.

There are two options for how the weapon was tested. Either the warhead was fired on an Israeli Jericho I two-stage ballistic missile from the Overberg Test Range in the southern Cape downrange towards an aerial detonation point near the target islands: Israel and SA were indeed collaborating on missile development at Overberg. 

Or, as suggested by Leonard Weiss of the Centre for International Security and Co-operation at Stanford University in the US, it was placed on a heavy barge sited off the Prince Edward Islands. Weiss notes that an SA Navy task force was conducting still-classified secret manoeuvres in the relevant period, which would support either hypothesis.

Weiss cites HT Hawkins, senior scientist: global security at the Los Alamos laboratories in the US, as recalling having shown Vela 6911’s bhangmeter readout to the instrument’s developer, Herman Hoerlin. Without hesitation and without knowing the source of the reading, Hoerlin pronounced: “No doubt about it: an atmospheric nuclear explosion, several kiloton in yield, probably surrounded by lots of mass like a barge or the likes of it.”

Gerhardt claimed in a 1994 interview: “I learnt unofficially that the flash was produced by an Israeli-SA test, code-named Operation Phoenix”, but to this day, all relevant veteran SA officials maintain their denials. 

By November 1979, the AEB had built a bulkly demonstration model of a Little Boy-styled SA nuke; with an estimated six kiloton yield, it was code-named Video; Video Killed the Radio Star being a big hit song that year, this may have been a case of military wit. The next fully fledged six kiloton device, code-named Hobo (later renamed Cabot), was finished in December 1982 — “a Christmas gift for PW Botha”, Von Wielligh states wryly. 

Thereafter, under Project Bakker (later Hamerkop) in 1987-89, Armscor developed four production models of truly deliverable A-bombs, the “500 Series” from 501 to 504; Hobo’s warhead was removed and used in number 502, so presumably retained its six kiloton yield, but all the rest were of 20 kiloton yields, integrated into Raptor glide-bombs.

Dropped by Buccaneer bombers or Mirage F1AZ fighter-bombers, and springing open a pair of stabilising wings, the 3.65m-long, 38cm diameter, 989kg nuclear glide-bombs were smart-bombs in that they would be guided to their targets by a second aircraft. The range of the weapon was an impressive 250km.

To try to understand the awful power we are talking about, I run a 20 kiloton nuclear detonation simulation on Nukemap over the citycentre of Luanda, Angola, the primary enemy capital of apartheid Pretoria, selecting an airburst detonated at a height of 848m, calculated to cause maximum damage.

The chilling result is a fireball of 0.16km² at about 2,980°C vaporising anything within its reach, a 3.96km², 500-rem (Roentgen equivalent man, a unit of measurement for the biological damage caused by radiation) radiation radius that will kill most people either immediately or within a month, an 11.4km² median blast radius, collapsing most buildings, a 13.9km² thermal radius producing a 100% certainty of third-degree burns and starting widespread fires and with windows shattered within 90.5km² of ground zero.

Total fatalities are estimated by the simulator at almost 272,000, with well over half a million people injured, about 15% of them dying later of cancer.

What this horror means in real life, some of the world’s best writers have tried, and often failed, to adequately describe. The novelist Ibuse Masuji in his 1965 meditation on Hiroshima, Kuroi Ame (Black Rain), wrote: “In my mind’s eye, like a waking dream, I could still see the tongues of fire at work on the bodies of men.” 

Richard Rhodes, who won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb, quotes scores of witnesses, including a horrified 19-year-old girl who recalls: “There was a charred body of a woman standing frozen in a running posture with one leg lifted and her baby tightly clutched in her hands. Who on earth could she be?” 

But even Rhodes is reduced to concluding rather understatedly: “The world of the dead is a different place from the world of the living and it is hardly possible to visit there. That day in Hiroshima the two worlds nearly converged.” 

And yet key people involved in Project Festival are remarkably dispassionate about having achieved such godlike power: the late defence minister, who oversaw our nuclear weapons development, Lt-Gen Magnus Malan, in his autobiography, betrays no emotion at all, not even hubris. 

“In developing SA’s nuclear capability,” he writes simply, “the purpose was not to use nuclear bombs in a war situation but rather to use them as a credible deterrent against the possible deployment of nuclear weapons in a war situation by the enemy.”

Though, as a key decisionmaker, that’s about all Malan is prepared to say about the rationale behind SA’s decision to go nuclear, he is also dissembling: while the initial SADF nuclear weapons doctrine, developed by the Air Force’s “Bossie” Hyser and approved by Botha’s cabinet in April 1978, indeed involved a three-phased revelation of the country’s nuke capacity, purely as a deterrent, the staggered revelations did not require the possible deployment of an enemy nuclear capacity to the region to trigger the process, merely a credible threat to SA’s territory.

And Malan is silent on the fact that in November 1986, with state armaments firm Armscor having completed upgrading preproduction number 306 into a droppable nuke, a more aggressive stance was adopted when he and Botha approved a new, escalated nuclear deterrent strategy that allowed for the tactical use of battlefield nukes.

But miniaturised battlefield nukes, deliverable by the SADF’s G5 towed and G6 self-propelled artillery, had not been developed, so only the Melba (Video renamed) and 306 dumb-bombs, not suitable for tactical use, were available: 501, the first of the 20 kiloton smart-bomb devices that I modelled for Luanda, was ready only by June 1988.

And by the time new president, FW de Klerk, told his cabinet in November 1989 that he was ending the A-bomb programme, it was planned to construct nukes into the 1990s, including three tritium-boosted warheads of 100 kilotons and, if the warhead’s weight could be significantly reduced under Project Ostra, deliverable by Project Husky ballistic missiles with a claimed range of at least 9,000km. That is, they could hit Rio, Berlin, New Delhi, Jakarta or Perth.

And studies were well under way to produce a plutonium-implosion weapon similar to the about 21 kiloton “Fat Man” that wiped out Nagasaki, as well as an even more devastating thermonuclear H-bomb, where an A-bomb detonation triggers an even larger blast.

It speaks of cold-minded kragdadigheid that nuke 502 was completed in October 1988 in the very middle of tripartite peace talks begun in New York with Russia and Cuba over ending the war in Angola, achieved on December 22 1988 — and that 503 and 504 were completed in March 1989, after peace was signed and the strategic threat had fallen away, and the month after the UN’s team had been formed to oversee the transition to independence and democracy of South West Africa. 

The nuclear weapons programme at its peak in late 1989 possessed six live, deliverable nukes: two were the old six kiloton dumb-bombs, Melba and 306; one the six kiloton 502; and three were 500 Series 20 kiloton smart-bombs. Development on the 100 kiloton Ostra warhead had begun but was only expected to be completed in 1996, which turned out to be two years into a new, nonnuke democratic era.

Earlier this year, when I ask Prof André Buys, who had served as plant manager over August 1981 to January 1985 of the Kentron Circle facility, which in that period developed the preproduction 300 series, what it felt like when he saw his first atomic weapon, he too expresses no wonder, horror, pride, or any other visible emotion. This reminds me eerily of Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets’ flat statement in recalling Hiroshima: “It was all impersonal.”

Yet, when SA dismantled and destroyed its six nuclear weapons, confirmed by the International Atomic Energy Agency, in 1990-91, Tokyo took it very personally indeed, the act of political calculation earning SA the undying admiration of staunchly antinuke Japan.