it out. No official confirmation of its being a nuclear test has been made by South Africa. In 1997, South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad stated that South Africa had conducted a test, but later retracted his statement as being a report of rumours. In February 1994, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, former commander of South Africa's Simon's Town naval base who was later convicted of spying for the USSR, was reported to have said:Although I was not directly involved in planning or carrying out the operation, I learned unofficially that the flash was produced by an Israeli-South African test code-named Operation Phoenix. The explosion was clean and was not supposed to be detected. But they were not as smart as they thought, and the weather changedso the Americans were able to pick it up.Proliferation: A flash from the past David Albright, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists Nov 1997, pp. 15In 2000, Gerhardt said that Israel agreed in 1974 to arm eight Jericho II missiles with "special warheads" for South Africa. In 2010, The Guardian released South African government documents that confirmed the existence of Israel's nuclear arsenal. According to The Guardian, the documents were associated with an Israeli offer to sell South Africa nuclear weapons in 1975. Israel categorically denied these allegations and claimed the documents do not indicate any offer for a sale of nuclear weapons. Israeli President Shimon Peres claimed that The Guardian article was based on "selective interpretation... and not on concrete facts." Avner Cohen, author of Israel and the Bomb and The Worst-Kept Secret: Israel's Bargain with the Bomb, said "Nothing in the documents suggests there was an actual offer by Israel to sell nuclear weapons to the regime in Pretoria." Collaboration with Taiwan According to David Albright and Andrea Strickner, South Africa also engaged in close, long-term cooperation with Taiwan, which at the time was controlled by the autocratic KMT regime, sometimes along with the Israelis. Taiwan bought 100 tons of uranium metal from South Africa which was delivered between 1973 and 1974. In 1980 the Taiwanese contracted for 4,000 tons of uranium metal although it is not known how much of this order was ever delivered. In 1983 Taiwan and South Africa agreed to cooperate on laser enrichment, chemical enrichment, and building a small reactor. The South African reactor program was slowed down in 1985 due to budget cuts and was cancelled completely