12 April 2010
US President Praises South Africa for Dismantling its Nuclear Weapons Program: But has it really been done?
As reported by News24.com on 12 April 2010, President Barack Obama commended South Africa on the 11th for voluntarily dismantling its nuclear weapons program when he convened with South African President Jacob Zuma on the eve of a key summit on nuclear terrorism in Washington. But how do we know that the South African nuclear weapons have really been dismantled? This is the question that South African Author Ian Kruger poses in his thriller novel Strike of the Black Mamba.
The novel opens with the ingenious theft of a shipment of nuclear material from a cargo ship destined for Japan’s nuclear power reactors off the Namibian coast by a mastermind criminal, Donald Morse. Morse is an American whose company used to supply the South African Government with arms during the apartheid years, in contravention of the UN arms embargo at the time. Morse was eventually apprehended and sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. He later on escaped and fled to South Africa.
In the story, Morse knows that South African scientists developed really sophisticated nuclear weapons, and some of them stowed these weapons secretly away when the nuclear program was dismantled. Under the guise of a new Afrikaner right-wing movement, Morse proceeds to excavate the nuclear weapons and he has a chilling use for them which is only revealed at the climax of the novel.
Kruger mentions that the idea for the South African nuclear weapons came from a non-fiction book written by investigative journalists Peter Hounam and Steve McQuillan in 1995. The title of the book was The Mini-Nuke Conspiracy: Mandela’s Nuclear Nightmare and it proposed that apart from the six conventional atom bombs that the South Africans had built and showed to the world in 1993, they had secretly developed much more sophisticated nuclear weaponry, including mini nukes. They concluded that it is highly possible that these weapons of mass destruction might be secretly in the hands of right-wing elements in South Africa.
“The Mini-Nuke Conspiracy really set my creative juices flowing,” says Kruger, “and although my book, Strike of the Black Mamba, was first published in 2008, it is now even more relevant in lieu of three recent developments regarding South Africa. First is the praise given by the US President to South Africa regarding the dismantling of its nuclear weapons. Second is the recent tensions caused by the president of the ANC Youth League, stirring much trouble by singing the struggle song containing the words ‘shoot the Boer or Farmer’, as well as the murder of right-wing extremist Eugene Terreblanche, leader of the AWB, on his farm last week. Third is the terror threats made by Al-Qaeda as reported in the media last week, when it said it might attack athletes at the Soccer World Cup Games in South Africa in June 2010.”
Kruger advises us to keep in mind that the plot of his thriller novel is only a piece of fiction. Or is it?
Strike of the Black Mamba can be found at most online retailers world-wide, such as Amazon, as well as Kalahari.net and Crink.co.za in South Africa. The book was published by CruGuru with the ISBNs 978-1-920265-13-7 and 978-1-920265-72-4. More information can be found on Ian Kruger’s website: www.iankruger.com.