South African Characteristics: The Apartheid Legacy

Writing South African nuclear history is an exercise in piecing together a shredded past. In the last years of the apartheid regime, South African security establishment routinely destroyed documentation without legal authorization. This included almost all records pertaining to South Africa’s secret nuclear weapons programme and other matters deemed crucial for national security and the regime’s survival. These were categorized ‘uiters geheim’ (Afrikaans for ‘top secret’).Footnote ¹ After February 1990, when South Africa’s last white President Frederik Willem de Klerk announced the release of black opposition leader Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners, the majority-white government realized that with the loss of its grip on power would come the loss of its custody of all state records. What followed was an even more resolute shredding of official documentation. This affected all departments of the state. Between 1990 and 1994, selective destruction and systematic obfuscation reached their limits, in the hope that any incoming government could be kept from learning the intimate details constituting the apartheid past. Several archivists told me personally that former officials often took folders brimming with documents home upon retirement. Presumably, these served as insurance to prevent other people from learning detrimental secrets. Consequently, those who purged the archives willingly contributed to the deletion of over four decades of official state memory.Footnote ²

The outgoing apartheid regime was acutely aware that the rest of the world would eventually review and judge its racial policies. It also had time to act, which contributed significantly to the archival purges. Unlike other regimes in East Germany or Cambodia that fell and were replaced quickly, Pretoria’sFootnote ³ officials had enough time to carry out the destruction thoroughly over several years.Footnote ⁴ Indeed, the investigators of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), in an attempt to bring some justice to apartheid victims, stated that the destruction of records gained momentum in the 1980s and culminated in a concerted endeavour, officially approved by the Cabinet under Presidents P. W. Botha and, his successor, de Klerk. All this was done to remove evidence of the oppressive rule by the National Party (NP) spanning more than four decades.Footnote ⁵ It was only in late November 1995 that the Cabinet imposed a moratorium on the destruction of all governmental records, regardless of their age and of whether departmental heads and archive staff recommended their disposal.Footnote ⁶

Furthermore, research into the apartheid-era nuclear weapons history was rendered extremely difficult due to long-lasting secrecy laws and the hitherto uncontested monopoly of information held by the old regime. The destruction of most of the policy-related documents created by the institutions that dealt with nuclear issues – the Department for Mineral and Energy Affairs, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Defence Ministry – seriously infringed on attempts to reconstruct the past. What happened towards the end of apartheid was by no means ‘normal’ archival practice, it had more to do with preventing any successors from inheriting knowledge of some of apartheid’s best-kept secrets (see Figure I.1).Footnote ⁷

Figure I.1 During the transition to multiparty democracy in South Africa, a lot of records from several departments were destroyed to avoid having them fall into the hands of the new government. Here Thabo Mbeki receives the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, while F. W. de Klerk observes (Cartoon/SAHA collection item AL3129_H02).

Source: @Zapiro, Sowetan@2003. All rights reserved

Fortunately for researchers, however, some important South African documents escaped the shredding machine. In Disarming Apartheid I make good use of these survivors, interviews with former officials, as well as official records from archives outside South Africa, to recount the unique story of South Africa’s decision to dismantle its secret arsenal of nuclear weapons and join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear-weapon state.

South Africa and the NPT

With these words, in 1993 President F. W. de Klerk confirmed long-standing rumours that South Africa had indeed embarked successfully on a nuclear weapons programme during the Cold War. About two years before the announcement, on 10 July 1991, the South African government signed the NPT, the world’s most widely ratified multilateral disarmament agreement.Footnote ⁹ A few months later, Pretoria’s officials also concluded a comprehensive safeguards agreementFootnote ¹⁰ with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). As de Klerk later admitted, the six nuclear weapons completed during the Cold War (a seventh device was under construction) were safely dismantled between 1990 and 1991. This successful disarmament made South Africa the first – and so far the only – country known to have dismantled its entire indigenously developed nuclear weapons capability, and to subsequently adhere to the non-proliferation regime by joining the Treaty.Footnote ¹¹

Despite this notable distinction, little is known about South Africa’s internal nuclear decision-making processes or how the national position on NPT accession and IAEA safeguards evolved over time. Considering today’s global nuclear proliferation and disarmament challenges, this unprecedented termination of a full-scale nuclear weapons programme invites closer consideration. This investigation thus tackles the question of how South Africa’s accession to the NPT actually came about and therefore reconstructs the decision-making trajectory of the apartheid regime between 1968 and 1991.

From the mid-1970s until 1989, the government of South Africa actively pursued a nuclear weapons programme. During this entire period, the project was kept secret, even though the international community suspected that South African scientists were working on nuclear weapons. The nuclear devices served as an assurance for the white-minority regime and were intended to deter African liberation movements and their supporters in the region, namely Cuba and the Soviet Union. From Pretoria’s perspective, threatening the use of nuclear weapons was seen as a last resort to coerce Western support for the apartheid regime’s survival. This was deemed a credible reassurance strategy during the height of the Cold War in southern Africa, and was considered particularly relevant in case liberation movements, perceived as Soviet proxies, advanced too far South. The programme was kept secret, and the government’s ambiguity about the de facto status of its nuclear capabilities was key to the deterrence strategy. For almost twenty years, this kept the world guessing whether Pretoria’s leaders possessed nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them.Footnote ¹²

In turn, the secret development of its nuclear arsenal also affected South Africa’s position on the NPT. As no state possessing nuclear weapons, other than the five that acquired nuclear weapons before 1 January 1967, or in the process of acquiring them could accede to the NPT, apartheid leaders were initially prevented from signing it. Although during the Cold War, Pretoria refused to acknowledge its growing stockpile of nuclear weapons, the small leadership circle of people in the know was well aware that NPT signature would not be possible before unilateral disarmament. On the diplomatic level, this led South Africa to engage in an uneasy ‘dance’ with the NPT. Foreign policy officials had to skilfully drag out and delay international discussions for more than two decades in order to reduce global criticism, often without knowing the full details of the nuclear weapons programme.

Following the NPT’s opening for signature in 1968, the South African government under President Balthazar Johannes Vorster decided not to sign the Treaty, officially claiming that it would infringe on the country’s sovereignty in nuclear matters. Hence, apartheid leaders defied emerging global non-proliferation norms and evaded the nascent regime. While talks were initially held between South African, IAEA and US delegations with the aim of bringing Pretoria’s growing nuclear infrastructure under safeguards, the South Africans broke off negotiations in 1977. Over the following years, this gave rise to immense criticism within the IAEA and beyond. South African diplomats became increasingly marginalized in the IAEA and lost their seat on the Agency’s Board of Governors as well as the right to participate in the General Conference, the two policymaking bodies of the Vienna-based agency. The continued refusal of the South Africans to sign the Treaty stretched over two decades and in turn jeopardized the country’s IAEA membership.

It was only towards the late 1980s that the geostrategic situation in southern Africa changed tremendously. The looming end of the Border War saw Cuban soldiers withdraw from Angola, the Soviet grip on the region decline and the South Africans modify their nuclear deterrence strategy. This shift accelerated following the general election in September 1989. President P. W. Botha, a hardliner and staunch advocate of apartheid, was replaced by F. W. de Klerk. The new president surprised many by introducing tremendous reforms to end apartheid in South Africa. With the benefit of hindsight, these also encompassed important changes in South Africa’s disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control policies. This analysis brings new evidence and offers novel insights into this important transformation.

The South African case reminds us that nuclear disarmament is possible and highlights the combination of domestic political and geopolitical conditions of this possibility. It serves as an important reference point in current debates on nuclear non-proliferation, particularly with the developments presently unfolding in Ukraine. The South African experience reiterates the importance of security environments, and especially the perceptions of what constitutes a threat therein. Continuous missile and nuclear testing in North Korea, unilateral US withdrawal from the nuclear deal with Iran in 2019, as well as the last-minute extension of the New START Treaty between the United States and Russia in February 2021, all indicate that discussion about nuclear disarmament on a global scale is as acute today as it was at the end of the Cold War.Footnote ¹³

About the Book

More than thirty years after South Africa’s NPT accession, open questions remain about South Africa’s nuclear activities, and de Klerk’s 1993 claim that his outgoing government concealed nothing cannot be accepted at face value. But what has been omitted from the existing narrative?

While the disarmament achievements of the last apartheid government can only be praised, the final years of South Africa’s nuclear past are still shrouded in mystery. The nuclear rollback is often presented as a straightforward process: de Klerk succeeded P. W. Botha as State President, ordered the dismantlement of the nuclear weapons and then acceded to the NPT. However, this linear and almost teleological narrative tends to neglect many factors including the competing interests of the actors and institutions involved in the programme. I argue that the outcome was not as inevitable as later portrayals suggest, particularly concerning South Africa’s accession to the NPT.

The South African example contains important lessons. Surrendering nuclear weapons requires both domestic political preconditions and an international context perceived to be conducive. It cannot succeed if solely based on the moral conviction of the political leaders endorsing disarmament per se. De Klerk’s actions from 1989 to 1993 illustrate that his decisions were heavily influenced by his assessment of domestic political risks, which were weighed against the potential benefits and repercussions that disarming and signing the NPT would bring for his government. Disarming Apartheid tackles precisely this complex set of domestic, regional and international aspects and reconstructs the subcutaneous decision-making processes driving it. I follow the contours of shifting interests and positions within South African institutions and detail how they interacted with the outside world’s pressures and strategies.

Based on a foundation of new archival material from several countries and interviews with former key actors, I differentiate between South Africa’s decision to disarm its nuclear weapons and its entry into the international non-proliferation regime, illustrating how the latter proved a more sensitive domestic political task than has been previously understood. It becomes clear that NPT accession was a distinct decision separate from disarmament, and a far more challenging one to reach in the maze of domestic politics stretching across apartheid’s final years.

This is not to suggest that the decisions did not overlap or were unconnected. However, accession to the NPT and the conclusion of a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA did not automatically follow the decision to terminate the nuclear weapons programme in late 1989. It took much longer to materialize. Indeed, this step was not taken for another two years by de Klerk and his advisors due to a number of considerations including the domestic fulcrum of power and the internal reform process towards democracy.

Different reasons motivated de Klerk to disarm and join the NPT. Firstly, he inherited the nuclear weapons programme from his predecessor P. W. Botha in 1989 and did not like it. De Klerk had been aware of the programme since the early 1980s when, as Minister of Mineral and Energy Affairs, he was briefed about it as one of a handful of politicians. He felt South Africa did not need nuclear weapons and had misgivings about the massive spending associated with the programme.Footnote ¹⁴ Therefore, immediately upon his election as President in September 1989, he made moves towards termination, believing that the nuclear weapons had become obsolete considering the improved regional security environment. Moreover, he was also motivated to reduce South Africa’s international isolation, which in part stemmed from the characteristic nuclear ambiguity the country displayed throughout the Cold War. De Klerk regarded NPT signature as a crucial step towards becoming a respected member of the community of states. Joining the NPT, he and his advisors knew, could only be achieved legally through the prior dismantlement of the nuclear weapons arsenal and by inviting the IAEA to inspect South Africa’s nuclear facilities.Footnote ¹⁵

The importance of South Africa’s NPT accession in the plans of domestic reformists and advocates of the global non-proliferation regime at the end of the Cold War dawned on me only after my research stint in the UK National Archives at Kew Gardens more than a year into this project. It was then that I realized how UK, US and Soviet diplomats, in a concerted effort, tried to make NPT signature palatable for the white regime in Pretoria towards the end of the Cold War. In light of more and more documentary evidence I amassed from archives on three different continents, I began to see the story take shape. After years of defying the NPT, in 1988, leaders in the top echelons of the apartheid regime were finally willing to move towards giving up nuclear weapons and signing the Treaty. This window of opportunity was used by the three NPT Depositaries, the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union, to good effect.

While the Cold War tensions in the region abated, the South African domestic arena remained fractured and political reform far from certain. At the time de Klerk ordered the disarmament in early 1990, the South African government was not yet on a clear path towards democratic majority rule and only slowly gearing towards a political transition.Footnote ¹⁶ In fact, the newly elected President himself was initially considered to be part of the conservative wing of the ruling NP. As late as 1989, a new facility for advanced weapons design was opened to the west of Pretoria, known as the Advena Central Laboratories, with the purpose of expanding the nuclear delivery options. Moreover, the Armaments Corporation of South Africa (Armscor) and the Atomic Energy Corporation (AEC) had stated their willingness to continue with the nuclear weapons programme just a year before.Footnote ¹⁷

At its core, the book discusses the evolution of the South African government’s position vis-à-vis the NPT under white-minority rule, from the Treaty’s conclusion in 1968 to the NP’s decision in favour of disarmament and accession in 1991. For years, the official South African NPT strategy, as stated by the government, stressed Pretoria’s general interest in and support of non-proliferation norms and even proclaimed accession to be a feasible option under the condition that it would enjoy the same rights as other states under the Treaty. This ostensible openness, however, ran counter to the secret development and completion of six nuclear weapons by South African scientists under apartheid rule. Contrary to official professions that the leadership was prepared to enter into negotiations about entry into the NPT regime, the reality was over two decades of defiance of the non-proliferation norm.

By bringing together the government’s position on non-proliferation with wider developments of the Cold War in southern Africa, Disarming Apartheid transforms understandings of both nuclear disarmament and the Cold War history of southern Africa. The end of the Cold War and the rapidly changing regional security dynamic and threat perceptions appear as a major driver of decision-making on NPT signature. Through its diplomacy with the three NPT Depositaries – the United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union – and engagement with a coalition of Frontline States – Namibia, Zambia, Angola, Tanzania, Mozambique and Zimbabwe – regarding NPT accession, the F. W. de Klerk government overcame various obstacles by enlisting the world’s major powers in a campaign to encourage NPT accession across the southern African region. The success of this strategy laid the groundwork for the establishment of the African nuclear-weapon-free zone (NWFZ).

Disarming Apartheid draws heavily on hitherto classified archival records obtained in the United States, the United Kingdom, at the IAEA and in South Africa itself. In particular, I enriched the at-times-incomplete South African archival records with documents from UK and US archives to comprehensively account for the multiparty negotiations leading up to South Africa’s NPT accession. Furthermore, the account uses more than 50 interviews conducted between 2016 and 2020 with people involved in the South African nuclear weapons programme in one way or another, as well as individuals from outside South Africa who were diplomatically engaged in advocating Pretoria’s adherence to non-proliferation norms throughout the 1970s and 1980s. My hope is to present the reader with an authoritative account of South Africa’s nuclear history.

Previous accounts of the dismantlement of the South African nuclear weapons programme and NPT accession have been incomplete and often suffered from neglect of primary records.Footnote ¹⁸ Partly, this is due to the fact that archival records are subject to lengthy classification periods that have only recently reached their limits. In addition, no existing account has undertaken to comprehensively examine South Africa’s motivations for NPT accession and disarmament, least of all based on South African records. Therefore, the internal deliberations on NPT accession remain poorly understood.

Nuclear histories of major powers such as the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom and China have been extensively researched and broadly published. Other histories have often been confined to ‘case studies’ illustrating international relations and proliferation theories. Recently, monographs appeared on the nuclear histories of the less well-known cases of nuclear proliferation and restraint, such as Sweden, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Brazil and Ukraine.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet until now, no academic monograph detailing the history of the South African nuclear programme and disarmament existed. This gap is particularly striking concerning the second decade of the programme’s existence, which started in the early 1980s, presumably because until recently relevant archival collections were subject to binding security regulations.

Over the last three decades, however, the South African case has featured in models and comparative analyses of nuclear rollbacks, mostly in political science literature concerned with dissecting best-practice examples for non-proliferation policies.Footnote ²⁰ The argument of my book can also be understood as addressing this need, because without a thorough, in-depth understanding of the South African disarmament and NPT accession process, it is difficult to draw conclusions and apply them to other scenarios.Footnote ²¹ It is therefore valuable to broaden the scope of empirical investigations beyond the nuclear decision-making to also account for the interplay between domestic and international political dynamics, mapping the motivations of actors who took strategic decisions in the final years of the apartheid regime.

Owing to the multilateral nature of the Treaty itself, Disarming Apartheid was greatly informed by approaches used in Cold War studies and global history more broadly, because the traditional parameters of the superpower conflict are not adequate to fully capture the extent of a single state’s nuclear past. Analysing these processes from a transnational and global perspective, as I did in this book, is indispensable to fully grasp the entanglements between the domestic, regional and international spheres. A focus that solely considered the national arena would fall short of accounting for the mutual reinforcement of these two dimensions in South Africa’s NPT accession. It is vital to pool a variety of perspectives, such as those of the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, the British government under Prime Minister Thatcher and the IAEA Secretariat. While the South African perspective is most fully reconstructed, it is thus not examined in isolation.

Archival Research

Multilingual archival research – a hallmark of global history for many years now – also substantially informs Disarming Apartheid. An essential tool for scholars concerned with the Cold War, this approach highlights the myriad facets of global connectivity. In fact, more than a decade after Odd Arne Westad’s The Global Cold War,Footnote ²² scholars increasingly make use of archives situated outside the United States and Europe that were previously marginalized in conventional approaches to the Cold War. This is not surprising, given that archival holdings outside the usual binary approaches not only shed light on the national history of the state in question, but also connect that country to broader geopolitical currents and political projects, thereby challenging the bipolarity inherent in traditional approaches. Indeed, with an emphasis on engaging with the Cold War’s nuclear history, Leopoldo Nuti and Christian Ostermann claim that traditional parameters of the superpower conflict are not adequate to fully capture the extent of a state’s nuclear past. With an emphasis on apartheid South Africa, they claim its ‘[history] can only be understood by integrating the bipolar framework with a strong emphasis on the local and the domestic dimensions of Pretoria’s atomic policies’.Footnote ²³

Over the course of my research, it became clear that foreign affairs files, both from South Africa and from the United Kingdom, provide an indispensable source for reconstructing the events. This was the case in the DFAFootnote ²⁴ Archive, which produced several documents pertaining to multilateral negotiations. The British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) Archive provided a significant number of records on the topic too, as did the National Security Archive in Washington D.C. These records give crucial insights into the multilateral and bilateral meetings towards the end of the Cold War. The predominant use of British and South African records throughout the book reflects the state of availability, because it was not for a lack of trying that only a comparatively small number of documents of US origin feature in the study. The primary sources on which this book relies, however, include secret letters from the head of the AEC in South Africa, strategy papers from the DFA regarding South Africa’s NPT accession, and sources from US and UK archives such as telegrams, interdepartmental letters, records of meetings and internal minutes. Distributed among ministries (Energy, Defence, Foreign Affairs) and embassies, they illustrate the politicized ‘how and why’ of Western states’ attempts to influence the apartheid regime in its nuclear decision-making.

Archival research in South Africa proved complex and time-consuming because the task of identifying and locating the relevant documents was hindered by the almost complete absence of digital finding aids, rendering my very first research stint in 2016 rather cumbersome. In contrast to the IAEA Archive and the British National Archives, which provide digital finding aids, it is nearly impossible to determine from abroad what South African archives harbour in their holdings. Even knowledgeable archivists were at a loss when it came to identifying even remotely relevant sources. This just goes to show the degree of serendipity involved in archival research, from which I also benefited. With a view to the current state of affairs in South Africa, one cannot shake off the feeling that preserving archival records, especially from the Cold War era, has not been a priority for successive post-apartheid governments. Most probably, this results from an unfavourable combination of lack of funds and a general indifference towards records dating back to the apartheid era.

Lastly, for several reasons, Soviet sources were not consulted. This concerns inter alia the personal papers of Roland Timerbaev, the Soviet ambassador to the IAEA. Due to restrictions downstream from the COVID-19 pandemic, his files are currently inaccessible at the PIR Center in Moscow.

Interviews

I conducted more than 50 semi-structured narrative interviews throughout 2016 and 2020 with people from relevant institutions who had been engaged in the decision-making. The choice of respondents was limited to those who were in one way or another either involved in the nuclear programme on the South African side or internationally exposed to matters concerning non-proliferation in bilateral or multilateral interactions with the apartheid regime. This included the former South African President F. W. de Klerk, who presided over the nuclear rollback and NPT accession, the Mineral and Energy Affairs Minister, the Finance Minister and his Deputy, several ambassadors, the chairman of the AEC, the head of the South African National Intelligence Service (NIS), a number of Generals of the South African Defence Force (SADF), senior managers of Armscor and more than a dozen DFA officials who had been posted to the IAEA in Vienna and to Washington D.C. Moreover, British Foreign Office and US State Department officials were contacted, most of whom had been directly involved in discussions with the South Africans between 1988 and 1991.Footnote ²⁵

The search eventually became more fine-tuned as I targeted not only the top echelons of the respective institution or department’s structures. I decided to speak with former desk officers who attended meetings and drafted the papers that formed the basis for later decisions. At the same time, this brought to the fore old power structures and networks of the military-security establishment of the former regime. The value of the oral history interviews increased tremendously when used to cross-check certain factual assumptions based on archival documents and to develop additional interpretations. In turn, thanks to the knowledge gathered from primary sources, I could pose detailed questions during interviews. In some cases, the initial enquiry only triggered an ‘official’ version of the events, which the person had already given several times or even published. However, once I started asking more specific questions touching upon issues that had not been discussed in previous accounts, I uncovered new ground (see Chapters 3–5). Furthermore, I strongly believe that my own background, being a young white male from Germany, helped tremendously in the context in which the research was carried out. And so did other privileges I enjoy, such as the freedom to travel unrestrictedly through South Africa, the United States and various parts of Europe with the necessary funding provided by research institutions to pay for these trips.

Outline of the Book

Following the Introduction, Chapter 1 begins with a brief sketch of the development of the domestic nuclear energy sector in South Africa (1950–1977). It illuminates how scientists were able to tap into sources of cooperation and funding to advance the nuclear energy industry during the 1960s and 1970s, following the Plowshare Program initiated under US President Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace initiative. Part of this chapter is devoted to the cooperation between South African, French and German firms. Recently obtained primary sources show how these collaborations enabled apartheid scientists to realize their vision of erecting the nuclear infrastructure to produce enriched uranium locally, ultimately feeding their nuclear weapons. I show how internal South African opposition to subjecting its nascent nuclear infrastructure to the emerging global non-proliferation regime manifested itself during that period, with repercussions for the coming decades.

Chapter 2 closely examines developments in the South African government’s position on the NPT from the mid-1970s to 1981. It starts with an overview of the emerging South African defence sector and the government’s growing parallel interest in building a nuclear deterrent. In addition, it also deals with the relationship between Pretoria and Washington, particularly analysing the way in which the United States under President Carter pressured South Africa to accede to the NPT and the continued defiance of non-proliferation norms by the apartheid regime.

The following Chapter 3 establishes the nexus between South African policies on the NPT and their defiance thereof, and the continued parallel development of nuclear weapons. Drawing on recently declassified documents, I trace the national position of the South African government on NPT accession and the application of IAEA safeguards over the 1980s. Most importantly, the focus lies on domestic decision-making and how a small number of people in the South African government decided whether to sign the NPT. This also includes a careful analysis of Pretoria’s relations with the US government under President Ronald Reagan and related exchanges with the IAEA Secretariat under its Director-General Hans Blix, developing in parallel over the period from 1981 to 1988.

Chapter 4 traces how South Africa’s position on the NPT evolved during the transition from P. W. Botha to F. W. de Klerk. My concentrated attention here lies on the role played by the South African DFA because the department’s officials were intimately involved in setting up these multilateral talks and, more crucially, were at the forefront of advocating the South African strategy on the NPT internationally. The ensuing discussion reconstructs events chronologically, bringing together the views of the South African, British, American and Soviet officials who dealt with the issue.

Chapter 5 engages with the brief period of decision-making in which the nuclear rollback decision was initiated by newly elected President F. W. de Klerk. Set against the winding down of the Cold War in the region and the final stages of the Border War in Angola, I discuss the end of the nuclear weapons programme, showing how the South African strategy on NPT accession changed to incorporate the region in an attempt to ultimately broker a NWFZ in southern Africa. I detail how the apartheid regime, and in particular the DFA officials, revised their strategy to enable de Klerk and his advisors to be able to present signature to the Treaty to domestic opponents as a step worthy of pursuance. I also highlight how President F. W. de Klerk’s newly elected government had to consider and balance international opinion and pressure in the form of sanctions and embargoes. Moreover, I illuminate the need for the government to come to terms with a domestic situation of rising unrest and increased right-wing pressure threatening the reforms initiated by the NP, and how Pretoria finally acceded to the NPT.

The ultimate Chapter 6 bridges the gap between the apartheid years and the post-apartheid majority government under African National Congress (ANC) rule. Following the signature to the NPT, the saga of South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme was far from over, as the government still had to conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement with the IAEA. I illuminate how the nuclear sector inherited from the apartheid era was scaled down under the first democratic government. In addition, yet another leftover from the apartheid past continued to make headlines well into the second decade of the new millennium: the highly enriched uranium (HEU) in the hands of the South Africans remained an irritating issue from a US non-proliferation policy point of view. By looking at the government’s nuclear policies under ANC majority rule, I reveal that the Thabo Mbeki and Jacob Zuma administrations were not receptive to US incentives to sell South Africa’s remaining HEU to Washington. However, from the US State Department’s perspective, this could have decreased the danger of proliferation.

Lastly, the Conclusion provides a summary of the main findings and arguments made. The central argument highlighted here is that revisiting the South African case study of denuclearization in light of newly available archival documents contributes rich texture to any future debate about global nuclear disarmament.