Carter's Desperate Crusade

A crisis with South Africa and Pakistan over nuclear weapons

Like mushrooms after a spring rain, nuclear plants in recent years have sprouted all over the globe. The reason is clear: as the price of oil becomes ruinously expensive, and oil's availability more uncertain, most nations must take steps to acquire alternate sources of energy. But the spread of this potent technology has also led several countries to try to acquire nuclear weapons on their own. Persuading them not to do this has become a desperate diplomatic crusade of the Carter Administration. Washington's opposition to expanding the nuclear club is often at odds with other vital U.S. objectives and subjects the White House to charges of fumbling or incompetence. South Africa and Pakistan last week be came cases in point.

In a toughly worded statement read on prime-time television in South Africa, Prime Minister P.W. Botha announced the expulsion of several members of the American mission in Pretoria for "aerial espionage." A grim-faced Botha told South Africans that a twin-engine Beechcraft turboprop used by U.S. Am bassador William B. Edmondson had been "converted for use as a spy plane by the installation of an aerial-survey camera under the seat of the copilot." The Prime Minister charged that "the embassy air craft was engaged in a systematic pro gram of photography of vast areas of South Africa, including some of our most sensitive installations." Botha's disclosures seemed designed both to embarrass the Carter Administration at a time when the U.S. is pressing South Africa to accept a United Nations plan for the inde pendence of Namibia, and to deflect attention from his scandal-ridden government at home.

The State Department flatly refused to deny the charges, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance said that "no apology" would be issued, as the South African Prime Minister had demanded. The following day, Willem Retief, South Africa's Charge d'Affaires, was summoned to the State Department and told that two of his mission's military attaches were being ordered to leave the U.S. within a week, in direct retaliation for the expulsion of three American defense attaches.

The brusque U.S. response to Botha's charges, as well as the refusal to deny that espionage was involved, reflected the Administration's worries about South Africa's nuclear capacity. In 1977 U.S. and Soviet aerial reconnaissance photos provided evidence that the South Africans were preparing to test a nuclear device in the Kalahari Desert. Despite Pretoria's assurances that "it does not have and does not intend to develop nuclear explosives," President Carter declared at the time that the U.S. would continue "to monitor very closely" South Africa's nuclear development.

Washington has also been concerned about proliferation in Pakistan. Several weeks ago, the Carter Administration accumulated what one official described as "good, solid evidence that Pakistan was after the bomb," having made carefully screened purchases of nuclear enrichment equipment from several West European firms. The conclusion triggered a U.S. decision to cut $40 million in annual aid to Pakistan. That step is required by the Arms Export Control Act, which calls for an aid cutoff to nations involved in the exchange of nuclear enrichment or reprocessing materials without international safeguards. Administration officials anguished over the impact that such a move could have at a time when Washington sought to bolster relations with Pakistan and to persuade its ruler, General Zia ul-Haq, to spare the life of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The realities of nuclear power prevailed, however, and the aid was cut off.

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