A First in the Age of the Atom : South Africa reveals it dismantled a nuclear program that built six bombs

Long-held suspicions that South Africa had developed nuclear weapons are now acknowledged by President F. W. de Klerk to have been based on hard fact. Starting in 1974 South Africa embarked on a $250-million program to produce a fission device. Fifteen years later it had six small nuclear bombs, each about the size of the one that effaced Hiroshima in 1945.

De Klerk says that when he took office in 1989 he ordered these devices destroyed and the nuclear program ended. South Africa thus seems to have become the first nuclear power to have voluntarily de-nuclearized. It hardly needs emphasizing that the world would be a safer place if other nuclear-ambitious countries--North Korea, Iraq, Iran and Libya are at the head of the list--could be made to follow that example.

De Klerk says the nuclear weapons were never meant to be used in combat. The strategy instead was to reveal their existence--probably by exploding one in a test--if South Africa had been threatened from outside. The aim would have been both to deter attack and to induce the United States and other Western powers to intervene to lift the threat. The key political assumption here is that Washington would have run the international risks of coming to the rescue of the apartheid regime rather than see a nuclear device exploded. It would be interesting to have the views of former officials in the Reagan Administration on that prospect. In any case De Klerk now suggests that the end of the Cold War and the presumed lifting of any international threat against South Africa obviated the need to have a nuclear arsenal.

Maybe. But there may have been a considerably different and more self-interested incentive for destroying existing nuclear weapons, dismantling the industry that produced them and opening the country to international nuclear inspectors. That incentive would be the country’s move toward democratization, a process that, when completed, will see the black majority enfranchised, after which power almost certainly will pass largely into nonwhite hands. The decision to abandon the nuclear program may thus, more than anything else, have been a simple act of preemptive disinheritance.