South Africa is one of the few countries in the world to create and then denounce nuclear weapons.

In fact, some arms control advocates have used the country as a model for further nuclear disarmament.

Before we feel too smug, though, it’s important to note that the reasons for creating nuclear weapons in the first place, and the subsequent reasons for destroying them, had little to do with goodwill or an act of good faith towards global disarmament.

Instead, the story of why we created nuclear weapons, and then let them go, is complicated and rooted in apartheid history.

The National Interest outlines the origins of our nuclear program, which started in the 1960s.

South Africa sought nuclear weapons for familiar reasons. Although it enjoyed presumptive conventional dominance over any likely regional opponent, Pretoria worried that the advantage might erode over time. The South African government also appreciated that widespread disdain for its apartheid system might prevent Western countries (including the United States) from coming to its aid in any serious confrontation against the Soviet Union or its allies.

Nuclear weapons would provide not only a direct way of confronting a military attack against South Africa, but also a means of leveraging Western diplomatic and military support during a crisis.

South Africa mined the uranium on our own soil, and then developed the technical expertise needed to build a weapon, in part by accessing “technologically sophisticated institutions of learning and research”, both in the US and Europe.

We didn’t just build one weapon, we built a few.

Overall, South Africa constructed six uranium gun fission weapons (similar in nature to the Little Boy weapon dropped on Hiroshima).

The devices were too large to fit onto any existing South African missiles, and consequently would have been delivered by bombers such as the English Electric Canberra or the Blackburn Buccaneer.

There has never been confirmation of tests conducted using the devices, and in 1977, pressure from the likes of the US, the Soviet Union, and France led to an underground detonation being cancelled.

At the end of the Cold War, the need for nuclear weapons as a deterrent was greatly decreased.

States like Angola could no longer count on the Soviet Union and Cuba for support, and consequently could not pose a real conventional military threat to South Africa…

At the same time, the National Party began negotiations with the African National Congress to end apartheid rule. The prospect of a South African government led by the ANC possessing nuclear weapons may also have given the apartheid regime some pause.

That is denied by the likes of FW de Klerk, but it’s widely believed that the government got rid of the weapons so that the ANC wouldn’t take hold of them.

By the time the ANC was voted into power, 1994, all of the country’s nuclear weapons had been disassembled.

You can read the story in full on The National Interest.

[source:nationalinterest]