[NukeNet] Break In At S Africa Nuke Plant

[Bill Smirnow]

   http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/15/world/africa/15joburg.html
    Break-In at Nuclear Site Baffles South Africa

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By MICHAEL WINES
Published: November 15, 2007
JOHANNESBURG, Nov. 14 - This much is known: Just after midnight on Nov. 8,
Anton Gerber was sitting with his fiancée in the control room of South
Africa's most secretive nuclear facility, the site at which this nation's
apartheid government conceived and delivered six atomic bombs, when four
gunmen burst into the room. Mr. Gerber pushed his fiancée under a desk. The
attackers shot him in the chest, grabbed a computer and fled, but abandoned
their booty as they came under assault by guards.

Now, one week after the assault, the most serious on a nuclear installation
in recent memory, the government is largely mum about who was behind it, how
they broke in or why.

Already, the attack is raising questions among advocates and analysts about
the wisdom of plans by South Africa and other African states to embrace
nuclear energy as a solution to chronic power shortages and the looming
problems of climate change.

The assault on the Pelindaba nuclear reactor and research center, one of
South Africa's most zealously guarded properties, is a severe embarrassment
to the government. The four gunmen escaped cleanly, neither caught by guards
nor identified on surveillance cameras. Mr. Gerber is still recovering.

On Tuesday, officials belatedly acknowledged that the Pelindaba reactor had
come under attack that same night by a second team of gunmen who were also
repelled - and also escaped - after guards sounded an alarm.

The Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, the government-created heir
to the apartheid nuclear program, said it suspended six security officials
after the assaults and hinted that the break-ins were inside jobs, made
possible only by intimate knowledge of the elaborate defenses.

But no one has offered a plausible explanation for the assaults. A Pretoria
News report, withdrawn under government pressure, suggested a love triangle
involving Mr. Gerber and his fiancée, a plant supervisor. Others have raised
the specter of terrorism, without evidence.

South Africa's nascent antinuclear movement called the break-ins evidence of
the government's lackadaisical approach to nuclear power. "They've failed to
control activities there; they've failed to protect the people," said
Mashile Phalane of Earthlife Africa, an environmental and social justice
advocacy group.

Pelindaba is vital to the government's efforts to build a high-tech
infrastructure. It researches advanced scientific issues, and, some experts
say, holds bomb-grade enriched uranium. It was at Pelindaba that the
apartheid government devised and built as many as seven atomic bombs in the
1970s and 1980s.

The government renounced its nuclear bomb program late in the apartheid era,
and democratic South Africa has said it has obliterated most of the
technology. Critics are skeptical, but it is unclear if bomb-making
information would be so casually stored as to be available to burglars.



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