USA 'unease' about NuclearWeapons stored in #Pretoria #SouthAfrica vault which has been attacked 3 times
March 15, 2015 Pelindaba, South Africa — Enough nuclear explosive to fuel half a dozen bombs, each powerful enough to obliterate central Washington or most of Lower Manhattan, is locked in a former silver vault at a nuclear research center near the South African capital.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/us-unease-about-nuclear-weapons-fuel-takes-aim-at-a-south-african-vault/2015/03/13/b17389f6-2bc1-4515-962d-03c655d0e62d_story.html?tid=pm_world_pop
GRAPHIC OF BREAKIN AT PELINDABA NUCLEAR CENTRE:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/uranium-security-in-south-africa/2015/03/13/2ea1d0ae-c9a1-11e4-a199-6cb5e63819d2_graphic.html
Technicians extracted the highly enriched uranium for the bombs in 1990, then melted the fuel down and cast it into ingots.
Over the years, some of the cache has been used to make medical isotopes, but roughly 485 pounds remains, and South Africa is keeping a tight grip on it.
That gives this country — which has insisted that the United States and other world powers destroy their nuclear arsenals — a theoretical ability to regain its former status as a nuclear-weapons state. But what really worries the United States is that the nuclear explosives here could be stolen and used by militants to commit the worst terror attack in history…
Senior current and former U.S. officials say they have reason to be concerned. On a cold night in November 2007, two teams of raiders breached the fences here at the Pelindaba research center, set in the rolling scrubland a half-hour’s drive west of Pretoria, the country’s administrative capital. One group penetrated deep into the site unchallenged and broke into the site’s central alarm station. They were stopped only because a substitute watch officer summoned others.
The episode remains a source of contention between Pretoria and Washington because no suspects were ever charged with the assault, and officials here have dismissed it as a minor, bungled burglary. U.S. officials and experts — backed up by a confidential South African security report — say to the contrary that the assailants appeared to know what they were doing and what they wanted: the bomb-grade uranium. They also say the raid came perilously close to succeeding.
The episode still spooks Washington, which as a result has waged a discreet diplomatic campaign to persuade South Africa to get rid of its large and, by U.S. reckoning, highly vulnerable stock of nuclear-weapons fuel.
But South African President Jacob Zuma, like his predecessors, has resisted the White House’s persistent entreaties and generous incentives to do so, for reasons that have partly baffled and enormously frustrated the Americans.
President Obama, in a previously undisclosed private letter sent to Zuma in August 2011, went so far as to warn Zuma that a terrorist nuclear attack would be a “global catastrophe.”
He proposed that South Africa transform its nuclear explosives into benign reactor fuel, with US help.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/us-unease-about-nuclear-weapons-fuel-takes-aim-at-a-south-african-vault/2015/03/13/b17389f6-2bc1-4515-962d-03c655d0e62d_story.html
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