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- South Africa retained weapons-grade uranium after dismantling its nuclear weapons. The former apartheid government secretly developed nuclear weapons at Pelindaba, near the country's capital. South Africa chose to disarm in the 1990s and dismantled its bombs, but retained the highly enriched uranium (HEU) used to make them.
- Pelindaba held more than 1,000 pounds of highly enriched uranium. The stockpile was sufficient to manufacture approximately a dozen atomic bombs. Some of the uranium was used to manufacture medical products. South Africa classified Pelindaba as a national key point, meaning a facility requiring the highest level of security.
- Four armed men attacked Pelindaba on November 7, shortly after 1 a.m. The raid took place at a facility officially presented as a heavily protected nuclear installation. The programme described it as an unprecedented assault on a site holding weapons-grade uranium.
- The first group penetrated the perimeter and reached the emergency control centre. The four masked men breached a 10,000-volt electric fence, passed security cameras and travelled approximately three-quarters of a mile to the building. The control centre monitored security alarms and coordinated emergency responses.
- Anton Gerber was the principal eyewitness to the first group's attack. Gerber had worked at Pelindaba for 30 years and was chief of the plant's emergency control centre. When he saw the four armed men entering, he immediately telephoned the security office, approximately three minutes away, reporting that the building was under attack.
- The attackers reacted aggressively when Gerber attempted to summon help. Gerber recalled one of the men shouting, repeatedly, "Why do you phone?" He was surprised by the intrusion and initially wondered whether the incident was a joke.
- Ria Mering was dragged from the control room and held at gunpoint. She was the only other employee present. One attacker grabbed her by the ear, pulled her out and placed a gun against her head while the other three men fought with Gerber.
- A second armed group attacked the plant from another direction. On the opposite side of the facility, another group cut through the perimeter fence and opened fire on a security guard. The existence of two groups operating around the same time raised questions about whether the attacks were coordinated.
- Highly enriched uranium represented an extraordinary potential prize for criminals or terrorists. Harvard Kennedy School's Matthew Bunn, an expert on nuclear security who had studied the attack and written a classified government report, explained that HEU could be worth millions of dollars on the black market.
- Bunn warned that a relatively small quantity of HEU could enable terrorists to construct a crude nuclear weapon. He illustrated the quantity required as slightly more than the amount of uranium metal that would fit inside a six-pack of cans. He also explained that HEU is only weakly radioactive and can be handled with bare hands, making its theft particularly concerning from a security perspective.
- The attackers exploited a concealed weakness in the perimeter fence. General manager Arrie van der Bijl showed the investigators where the intruders entered, at the bottom of a ravine below the perimeter road. Security guards travelling along the road could not see the men working there.
- The intruders deliberately disabled the electric fence's security systems. One man used plastic clips to raise the bottom of the fence several inches and spent approximately 20 minutes crawling underneath the electrical wire. Once inside, he went directly to the electricity control box, disabled its alarm, cut the communications cable that would alert the security office and switched off the fence.
- Plant management acknowledged that the attackers knew what they were doing. When van der Bijl was shown how the intruders had disabled the fence and its warning systems, he agreed that they had demonstrated technical knowledge and appeared familiar with the security arrangements.
- The presence of Gerber and Mering in the control room resulted from an unusual staffing accident. The attack occurred on the night of a plant holiday party. The employee originally scheduled to work had become drunk, so Mering filled in at the last moment. Gerber was her fiancé and decided to stay with her, placing both eventual eyewitnesses in the control room when the attackers arrived.
- Gerber fought the attackers rather than surrendering. He initially considered raising his hands and asking what they wanted, but began fighting after one of the men struck him with an iron bar. He said he knocked two attackers down before confronting a third.
- Gerber was shot through the chest during the struggle. He did not immediately realise he had been shot and continued fighting. After he fell to the floor, the attackers repeatedly beat him while he was seriously wounded.
- The security response took approximately 24 minutes, despite an expected response time of three minutes. Gerber and Mering both described waiting for help while the attackers were inside. Mering said she wondered throughout the ordeal why security had not arrived. The delay gave the attackers time to escape.
- Both groups of attackers disappeared. The first group fled after shooting Gerber, while the second group also vanished. The programme questioned how two groups of armed men could operate at the facility at roughly the same time without the authorities establishing whether they were connected.
- South African nuclear officials disputed the possibility of a coordinated nuclear attack. Rob Adam, chief executive of the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa and the person responsible for Pelindaba, described the incident as random criminality rather than a concerted nuclear operation. He suggested that one technically sophisticated individual had acted with several associates, but admitted that he did not know what they wanted.
- Ambassador Abdul Minty presented the government's burglary explanation. Minty, one of South Africa's senior nuclear policy officials, said the available evidence suggested an attempted burglary. He pointed to an attempt to take a notebook computer from a facility, which the intruders subsequently left behind.
- The government's burglary explanation left an important question unanswered: why attack a nuclear facility? The interviewer challenged Minty's suggestion that office equipment could explain the intrusion, arguing that the radiological materials were the most valuable assets at Pelindaba. Minty maintained that the motivation was unknown and suggested that the facility's position beside a busy road, combined with its gates and security arrangements, might have attracted criminals looking for something valuable.
- Security cameras recorded the intruders, but the monitoring staff failed to report them. Footage from a perimeter camera showed the attackers, yet the guards responsible for watching the monitors did not raise the alarm. This exposed a serious gap between the facility's physical security infrastructure and the people responsible for operating it.
- Gerber's telephone records became central to the dispute over the security response. Records examined by the programme showed 24 minutes between his call for assistance and the arrival of security personnel. Gerber was also pursuing a lawsuit against Pelindaba and suspected that someone within the security operation had helped the attackers.
- Rob Adam gave inconsistent answers about how long security took to arrive. Initially, he said he understood that personnel had arrived within a couple of minutes. When confronted with the 24-minute allegation in Gerber's lawsuit, he said the facility's own calculations suggested a shorter delay. He then referred to an analysis of telephone records but could not provide an exact figure or explain the difference between the two accounts.
- The possibility of insider assistance was one of the most troubling aspects of the attack. Bunn questioned why the attackers appeared so confident that they could penetrate the facility without triggering alarms or receiving an effective security response. He suggested that someone inside might have helped them by ensuring the alarm systems failed and security personnel did not respond in time. This remained a hypothesis, not an established finding.
- Pelindaba management acknowledged considering the possibility of insider involvement. When asked whether anyone inside might have assisted the attackers, management said the possibility had crossed their minds. A financial reward was offered for information, but nobody had claimed it at the time of the programme.
- The attackers had not reached the uranium itself. Although they penetrated the first perimeter fence and reached the emergency control centre, accessing the HEU would have required overcoming additional fences, cameras, locks and security layers. The programme therefore established a serious breach without establishing that the attackers had reached or removed nuclear material.
- The attackers' technical competence and their failure to reach the uranium created an unresolved contradiction. They demonstrated knowledge of the perimeter's electrical and communications systems, yet their actual penetration stopped well short of the uranium storage areas. Their precise objective and level of preparation remained uncertain.
- The police took approximately 10 months to interview the principal eyewitness. Despite multiple investigations, Gerber said the police had not spoken to him until the 60 Minutes team arrived. He confirmed that neither he nor Mering had been interviewed during that period. He found the delay particularly strange because they were the only direct eyewitnesses to the attack.
- The United States government was sufficiently concerned to offer assistance with Pelindaba's security. Washington also offered to help convert South Africa's highly enriched uranium into a form that could not be used to produce an explosive nuclear weapon. The proposal addressed both the physical vulnerability of the facility and the danger posed by its weapons-grade material.
- South Africa questioned why it should surrender its uranium when other countries retained theirs. Minty challenged the proposal by asking why South Africa should be less secure than other countries and why it should give up its material when others did not. The interviewer responded that the attack had demonstrated a real vulnerability: armed men had reached the emergency control centre, shot an employee and operated alongside a second armed group elsewhere on the site.
- Minty acknowledged concern about the intrusion but defended the government's response. He said South Africa was concerned that anyone had managed to enter the facility and had taken steps to prevent a recurrence. However, he resisted the argument that the incident demonstrated a need to eliminate the country's HEU stockpile.
- Two camera operators were dismissed following the incident. They were the personnel responsible for monitoring the cameras that had recorded the intruders without prompting an effective response.
- The investigation ultimately remained unresolved. Despite the security failures, eyewitness accounts, CCTV footage, telephone records, multiple investigations and an offered reward, authorities had not identified who organised the assault or established whether the attackers intended to obtain uranium for a nuclear weapon.