Spying On South Africa's Nuclear Bomb

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.5 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2018

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During the Apartheid period, the South African government began developing a secret nuclear programme, culminating in the construction of six nuclear bombs. Anti-Apartheid campaigner, Renfrew Christie, first became aware of this when he was conscripted into the South African Army. He later gained access to details of the nuclear programme and passed them onto the military wing of the African National Congress, ANC. In 1979 Christie was arrested and later tortured. He spoke to Olga Smirnova about his hunt for South Africa's nuclear weapons and his ordeal in jail.

Photo: A restricted area sign close to the Koeberg nuclear power station, South Africa (Getty Images)

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less searching
0:25.7	and a lot more auction. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:29.7	Hello and welcome to the Witness Podcast from the BBC World Service, history as told by the people
0:36.2	who were there. I'm August Myernova. Today we are going back to the 1980s and the trial of a young South African academic who had used his
0:45.9	PhD studies to draw attention to apartheid South Africa's secret nuclear program.
0:52.3	I've been speaking to Renfrew Christie, who was tried as a terrorist
0:56.6	by the apartheid regime. They didn't hang me. The headlines around the world on the 4th of June said white scientists to face gallows and on the 6th of June said
1:08.4	white scientists escape scallows so I wasn't hanged. But they then put me and the other white male political prisoners in the hanging prison as close as possible to the gallows and we were forced to listen to people being hanged.
1:25.0	So I listened to about 300 people being hanged which was a gruesome experience. Renfrew Christie's
1:33.7	he know Renfrew Christie spent over seven years in prison, two and a half of those years on death row.
1:49.2	He would join fellow prisoners as they sang to condemned men going to their executions. Shenzhenina, Senzhenina.
2:06.3	What have we done?
2:08.0	What have we done?
2:11.0	What have we done?
2:12.0	Oh, So what had ran through Christie done to
2:26.0	so what had ran through Christie done to deserve his years in jail. He'd written a PhD thesis at Oxford University and then passed on some of his research to the African National Congress
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.