Pinnacle Event

Author’s Note

This is, of course, a work of fiction. However, there really was a secret South African nuclear bomb program. The Apartheid regime wanted the bomb to deter invasion by black African nations, led by the Cuban Army. Castro had stationed thousands of his troops in neighboring Angola and Mozambique.

The rumors at the time were that South Africa had help in its bomb program from Israel, although the Israelis denied it. In 1979, the American Vela satellite detected a possible nuclear explosion in the ocean near South Africa. The media were filled with stories that the flash seen by the satellite was an Israeli nuclear test, or a South African nuclear test, or some sort of joint test involving them both. President Carter asked a group of experts to study the incident. They reported that it could have been a malfunction of the satellite. Most of us in national security agencies at the time saw the report as a cover-up.

President Reagan appointed me to be Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence in 1985 and in that capacity I became one of the few in government entitled to see all that we knew about the South African nuclear program. My boss at the time, Ambassador Morton Abramowitz, sent me to South Africa for an extended “look around” and I became convinced that the Apartheid regime would soon perish, raising the question in my mind of what would happen with the nuclear program in the chaos of a transition.

In 1986, the U.S. Congress passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, making clear our opposition to the South African regime. One provision in the law required the State Department to report on what nations supplied South Africa with arms. It instructed the Administration to propose steps to be taken against countries which were in violation of the UN Arms Embargo. No one in the Department wanted personally to write that report because it was widely known that the chief arms supplying nation to South Africa was our ally, Israel. Thus, I was assigned the task.

While it did not discuss any nuclear program, the draft report documented a substantial conventional arms cooperation program between South Africa and Israel. It was damning. With the permission of my State Department superiors, I went to Israel with the draft, unclassified report. I told my Israeli friends that we were not seeking their confirmation or denial of the facts in the report; we were hoping that they would consider what they might do before the report was finished and published. The Israeli government in 1986 announced that it would not enter into any new contracts to sell defense materials to South Africa. Existing contracts would be completed.

In 1989, with six nuclear weapons completed, South Africa decided to stop production. By 1991, it had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and told the world that it had destroyed six nuclear weapons. Then the International Atomic Energy Agency was invited in to look around. Some inspectors were reported to have thought there were “anomalies” between, on the one hand, the records of production and destruction that they were given and, on the other hand, the capacity of the facilities they observed. Nonetheless, South Africa was given a clean bill of health by the IAEA.

What remained were the missiles. South Africa had made long-range ballistic missiles to deliver nuclear weapons. The RSA-3 missile was based on the Israeli’s Jericho missile system. It could not have carried the large bombs that South Africa said it had built and destroyed, but seemed designed for a more advanced and smaller weapon. By 1990, President Bush (41) had appointed me Assistant Secretary of State for Politico-Military Affairs. In that capacity, I went back to South Africa (a lot like the “young hotshot from the State Department” in chapter 10) to persuade the government to stop the missile program, including any use of it for space exploration or satellite launching. The missiles and their related facilities were then destroyed under American supervision.

In the 1990s, serving as President Clinton’s Special Assistant, I was concerned with our abilities to prevent, detect, and respond to nuclear weapons smuggled into our cities. With the President’s support, we assembled key cabinet members in the Blair House, opposite the White House, and ran them through an exercise of what it would be like for them to handle reports of a nuclear weapon in Washington, followed by its detonation. The Clinton Administration increased funding, training, and capabilities to prevent, detect, and dismantle a nuclear weapon in the hands of terrorists.

In 2009, a week before the Inauguration, we ran a similar exercise for the new Obama security cabinet officials, at President-elect Obama’s request. These exercises always had the same effect on the participants: they realized the detonation of a nuclear weapon in New York or Washington would be the worst catastrophe in American history, one in which our disaster response capabilities would be largely useless. American cities would empty out. The economy would collapse. The Obama Administration has since organized three global summits on the security of nuclear weapons and material. According to the State Department, those summits have resulted in:

• Removal and/or disposition of over 2.8 metric tons of vulnerable HEU and plutonium material.

• Completely removing HEU from 11 countries — Austria, Chile, the Czech Republic, Libya, Mexico, Romania, Serbia, Turkey, Ukraine, Vietnam, and Hungary.

• Verified shutdown or successful conversion to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel use of 24 HEU research reactors and isotope production facilities in 15 countries — Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, the Czech Republic, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

• Completion of physical security upgrades at 32 buildings storing weapons-usable fissile materials.

• Installation of radiation-detection equipment at 250 international border crossings, airports, and seaports to combat illicit trafficking in nuclear materials.

There is some debate among the world’s experts on how fast the Earth will experience sea level rise and how high the seas will go, but not on the fact that there will be significant ocean rising. The melting of the ice in Greenland and Antarctica will not only flood coastal cities, it will alter weather patterns, changing the value of vast regions. The rate at which the flooding occurs will, of course, determine how and whether we respond to it, by building dams around some cities, by having controlled mass migration from other, doomed cities. The cost of both saving some cities and losing others and building new ones to replace them will stress economies to the breaking point, however slowly or quickly it occurs. Nothing like it has ever taken place on this scale in human history. Some observers wonder whether human civilization can actually sustain itself through the transition, or whether there will be a new Dark Age in which the global economy and many nation states will collapse, along with scientific progress. Such considerations raise the issue of whether, rather than just debating about the veracity of climate change or measures to mitigate it, perhaps we should also start doing the modeling and planning for what happens if sea level rise occurs faster than we now assume it will. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently admitted that its previous Worst Case Scenario of the rate of climate change was inaccurate; the Worst Case had understated how rapidly glaciers were actually already melting and how quickly climate change was occurring.