Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to apartheid South Africa

From the Guardian:

Secret South African documents reveal that Israel offered to sell nuclear warheads to the apartheid regime, providing the first official documentary evidence of the state's possession of nuclear weapons.

The "top secret" minutes of meetings between senior officials from the two countries in 1975 show that South Africa's defence minister, PW Botha, asked for the warheads and Shimon Peres, then Israel's defence minister and now its president, responded by offering them "in three sizes". The two men also signed a broad-ranging agreement governing military ties between the two countries that included a clause declaring that "the very existence of this agreement" was to remain secret.

The documents, uncovered by an American academic, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, in research for a book on the close relationship between the two countries, provide evidence that Israel has nuclear weapons despite its policy of "ambiguity" in neither confirming nor denying their existence.

The Israeli authorities tried to stop South Africa's post-apartheid government declassifying the documents at Polakow-Suransky's request and the revelations will be an embarrassment, particularly as this week's nuclear non-proliferation talks in New York focus on the Middle East.

D'oh! So much for thinking out of the box!

Why didn't I think of this! (Oh, actually I just did. Never mind.)

Israel should do a deal selling atom bombs and nuclear technology generally to Iran in return for "normal relations", free trade, and all sorts of business deals and mutual defense pacts.

From "Axis of Evil" (make that eeeeevil) to Axis of Prosperity and Cooperation. Yee ha!

I'm not sure that this provides any evidence that Israel has nukes that anyone who is in continued denial about that fact would accept.

> 4 The difference is between people that like it, and people that don't.

There's an interesting article on American Jewish opinion on Israeli policy at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-est...

It begins: "In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel."