Since the project will probably involve replacing technology that originated in the Sixties, watchdogs are concerned the US might be inclined to test the newer systems and, therefore, breach the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Of more concern to watchdogs is President George Bush’s dedication to developing a new breed of “bunker-buster” nuclear weapon, designed to penetrate toughened underground defences. They estimate sleaze has cost the country $1bn (pounds 550m) in the past three years – about a fifth of this year’s budget.The appointment of Mr Githongo was one of President Kibaki’s first moves as he attempted to put his manifesto into action. But the book never explains how the two could have entered the storeroom without being seen.As for keeping a vial on his body over a period of around a year, this also stretched belief. What was true was that Goering had arrived very rotund and, as he lost weight, the folds of loose skin may have made concealing a vial a little easier. But, if he had the poison all that time, why did he wait so long to use it?Among those who think that the confessions of Mr Stivers could be plausible is Aaron Breitbart, a researcher at the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles. His story, he said, “is crazy enough to be true,” adding: “Nobody really knows who did it except the person who did it.”"It doesn’t sound like something made up,” said Cornelius Schnauber of the University of Southern California. “It sounds even more believable than the common story about the poison being in the dental crown.”If Mr Stivers feels better now for having lifted the guilt of his actions off his chest, he has his daughter to thank.

Ms Dadey, 46, explained to the LA Times, “I said: `Dad, you’re part of history. You need to tell this story before you pass away.’ It’s been on his conscience all his life.”. John Githongo said he “was no longer able to continue serving the government of Kenya” but gave no further reason for his departure as governance and ethics permanent secretary.
He was recruited in January 2003 from the anti-corruption non-governmental organisation Transparency International, to help President Kibaki’s new administration tackle the fraud that became endemic under the 24-year rule of the former president, Daniel arap Moi. It was medication, because Goering, they said, “was a very sick man”. They told him that: “It was medication, and that if it worked and Goering felt better, they’d send him some more.” Mr Stivers, apparently not thinking much of it, duly obliged, saying he would return the pen empty to Mona another day.

But after the “medicine” reached Goering’s hands, Mona and the two men disappeared. “I never saw Mona again, I guess she used me.”It was just two weeks later, on 15 October 1946, that the shocking news broke that Goering had taken his own life and the execution that was set for the next day had become moot Mr Stivers immediately thought he was responsible. But investigators never interrogated him or any of the other guards, beyond asking them if they had seen anything suspicious about Goering’s behaviour or activities.The regret and anxiety never left Mr Stivers. “I would have never knowingly taken in something that I thought was going to be used to help someone cheat the gallows,” he told the LA Times. But neither could he ever really believe the explanation offered by the Army – that Goering had been in possession of the cyanide all the time he was in captivity.It is true that, when the investigation was under way, officials found another vial of cyanide in belongings that had come with Goering when he was first transferred to Nuremberg. But his baggage had been kept under lock and key in a storage room.

How would the prisoner have had access to it unless taken there by one of the guards. This always seemed unlikely given how closely Goering was monitored.In the Fifties, the late Ben Swearingen wrote a book, The Mystery of Hermann Goering’s Suicide, in which he named a US Army lieutenant, Jack Wheelis, as having allowing Goering into the storeroom to retrieve a vial of poison shortly before his suicide. They were called Erich and Mathias, and they were interested in knowing if Mr Stivers would be willing to take notes to Goering hidden in a fountain pen. He willingly acquiesced, seeing no harm in it and still intent on impressing the girl.Then, the third time that they met, the two men said they wanted him to take something else to Goering hidden in a pen. Mr Stivers, who already had one girlfriend, an 18-year- old local named Hildegaard Bruner, relates how one day he met another girl, dark-haired and beautiful, outside a building that housed a military officers’ club. They talked and flirted a little and he told her that he was a guard of the defendants at the trial.