This issue of Proliferation Analysis and International Assessments includes a heavily excised article on Iraq, a piece on South Africa’s security prospects, and a apparently a third essay that has been wholly exempted. The essay on South Africa’s nuclear aims suggests that the arguments pro and con for a nuclear capability to deal with regional security threats are so powerful that “internal political and bureaucratic” consideration are probably more relevant for nuclear decisions.

This study begins, as the National Security Council requested, by assuming that the September 22, 1979 Vela event was a nuclear detonation. It discusses the possibility that the detonation could have occurred due to an accident, and noted the Defense Intelligence Agency’s suggestion that the Soviet Union might have had reasons to conduct a covert test in violation of its treaty commitments. But most of the study is concerned with other possibilities to explain the incident – a secret test by South Africa or Israel, or India, or Pakistan, or a secret joint test by South Africa and Israel. The 2004 version, in some instances, contains more information through page 10 than the 2013 version.

This study begins, as the National Security Council requested, by assuming that the September 22, 1979 Vela event was a nuclear detonation. It discusses the possibility that the detonation could have occurred due to an accident, and noted the Defense Intelligence Agency’s suggestion that the Soviet Union might have had reasons to conduct a covert test in violation of its treaty commitments. But most of the study is concerned with other possibilities to explain the incident – a secret test by South Africa or Israel, or India, or Pakistan, or a secret joint test by South Africa and Israel. The 2013 release (which is currently under appeal) includes some information from a “Secret Test by Others” (Pakistan, India) and the map on page 12 that had not been released before.

This report found “no hard evidence” that Iraq was intent on a nuclear weapons capability. Nevertheless, considering the scope of Iraq’s “ambitious” nuclear program, intelligence analysts concluded that the Baath regime was covertly seeking a weapons capability to support its pursuit of regional hegemony and to match the perceived Israeli nuclear threat.

This issue includes an extract from a recent study on Pakistan and two highly technical articles relating to on-going research to identify the signatures of high explosives used for the implosion method of nuclear detonation. It also includes a report that utilized open literature and classified intelligence, including two satellite photographs, the purpose of the article is to illuminate how the South African Government intended to use the site, down to the depth and thickness of the bore holes.

Memo reports that during the period the Carter administration was putting pressure on South Africa to avoid the nuclear weapons route, but the analysts suggested that even if the South Africans signed the NPT and accepted IEAE safeguards they would continue to pursue a “covert program.”

This report for the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) pointed to downsides of US and international pressures against pariah or otherwise beleaguered states such as South Africa and Israel and against would-be nuclear proliferants. They might cooperate to advance their goals.

With the term “weapons of mass destruction” having not yet fully come into general usage, this NIE used the term “special weapons” to describe nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons (formerly the term “special weapons” was sometimes used to describe nuclear weapons only). With numerous excisions, including the names of some countries in the sections on “East Asia and the Pacific” and “Central America,” this wide-ranging estimate provides broad-brushed, sometimes superficial, pictures of the situations in numerous countries along with coverage of international controls to halt sensitive technology exports to suspect countries.

For years, U.S. intelligence agencies did not take seriously Muammar Gaddafi’s efforts to develop a Libyan nuclear capability and this report provides early evidence of the perspective that the Libyan program “did not know what it was doing.” According to the CIA, the program’s “serious deficiencies,” including “poor leadership” and lack of both “coherent planning” and trained personnel made it “highly unlikely the Libyans will achieve a nuclear weapons capability within the next 10 years.” The Libyan effort was in such a “rudimentary stage” that they were trying to acquire any technology that would be relevant to producing plutonium or enriched uranium.

Seeking “constructive engagement” with the apartheid regime, the Reagan administration wanted the South Africans to keep a lid on their nuclear weapons program. The NIE’s top-secret status was compatible with one of the elements of the 1984 estimate: that any revelations that broke the regime’s “calculated ambiguity” about its nuclear status would put Washington in an “awkward position” by “fir[ing] the drive” for the sanctions and disinvestment campaigns which the administration was trying to avoid. Analyzing the motives for the nuclear program, the CIA found it “irrelevant” to any threat that the regime was likely to face.A key issue was whether South Africa had a nuclear arsenal. On that problem, the NIE dovetailed with the view taken by NIE-4-82: South Africa “probably has the capability to produce nuclear weapons on short notice.” That was accurate, but U.S. intelligence may not have known that the regime’s leaders had already decided to build a stockpile of 7 weapons, with six weapons assembled during the 1980s.