The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/P.W. Botha.md

title	aliases	created	updated	category	tags	summary	born	died	location
P.W. Botha	P.W. Botha P. W. Botha Pieter Willem Botha Piet Botha	2026-05-17	2026-10-09	Political Figure	Person Politician Military SouthAfrica Israel NuclearWeapons	P.W. Botha (1916-2006), South African Prime Minister (1978-1984) and State President (1984-1989), forged a covert wartime alliance with Israel and, after the 1979 VELA detection, publicly hinted at nuclear weapons capability.	1916-01-12	2006-10-31	Paul Roux, Orange Free State, South Africa

P.W. Botha served as Prime Minister of South Africa from 1978 to 1984 and as State President from 1984 to 1989. He had also served as Defense Minister and played a key role in developing South Africa's military and nuclear capabilities.¹

Israeli Alliance and SIMWA

In 1978, Menachem Begin dispatched Ezer Weizman, then Israeli Defense Minister, to Pretoria to meet Botha to discuss Israeli-South African relations. Despite Begin's intentions to downgrade the relationship, Weizman agreed with Botha on a wartime alliance between the two governments as the price for continuing nuclear tests. This led to the creation of SIMWA (SADF-IDF Mutual Wartime Agreement).¹

Minutes of 1975 meetings between Botha and Shimon Peres, reported by the Mail & Guardian, record a meeting in Zurich on June 4, 1975, at which Botha "expressed interest in a limited number of units of Chalet subject to the correct payload being available."² The same article reports that a covert agreement governing the military alliance known as Secment was signed some weeks before Peres's offer, and quotes its clause: "It is hereby expressly agreed that the very existence of this agreement … shall be secret and shall not be disclosed by either party."²

VELA Incident (1979)

On September 25, 1979, three days after a VELA Satellite recorded probable evidence of a nuclear explosion over the South Indian Ocean, Botha warned the Cape National Party congress that South Africa had and could produce sufficient arms to counter terrorism. He hinted that they might have military weapons that others did not know about, suggesting that South Africa and its Israeli partners had successfully conducted a secret nuclear test.³

Footnotes

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1. Ben-Menashe, Ari. Profits of War: Inside the Secret U.S.-Israeli Arms Network. Sheridan Square Press, 1992 (TrineDay reprint, 2015). ↩︎

2. Chris McGreal, "Revealed: How Israel offered to sell SA nuclear weapons," Mail & Guardian, May 24, 2010. https://mg.co.za/article/2010-05-24-revealed-how-israel-offered-to-sell-sa-nuclear-weapons ↩︎

3. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 20. ↩︎