The bombs of apartheid

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Aug 04, 2023

I have an incurable addiction to World War II - an inexhaustible goldmine of crazy stories.

Obviously, the recent release of the film Oppenheimer sent me spiralling down yet another World War II rabbit hole, learning what I can about J. Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the first nuclear weapons in Los Alamos, New Mexico.

This journey led me to a similar, yet lesser-known, tale of South Africa’s “Manhattan Project”.

In the late 1970s, with the Cold War in full swing, the communist USSR extended its tentacles to southern African nations, supporting various liberation movements. After Mozambique and Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975, both countries became embroiled in domestic conflicts involving communist forces. The USSR supplied weapons and training and financed the deployment of many thousands of Cuban troops, especially to Angola. Zimbabwe, too, was on the verge of independence.

As a counter, fearing encirclement by newly-independent African communist states, the apartheid governments led by Prime Ministers John Vorster, then P.W. Botha, whipped up a nuclear weapons programme as a potential deterrent.

However, by the time F.W. de Klerk became president in 1989, the geopolitical landscape was shifting, and the regional threats had fizzled.

In 1988, South Africa signed the Tripartite Accord with Cuba and Angola, which led to the withdrawal of South African and Cuban troops from Angola and independence for Namibia. The 'red scare' of communism was diminished when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, and the USSR collapsed.

Thus, de Klerk halted the nuclear program to end international isolation and improve South Africa's tarnished international standing. On March 24, 1993, he disclosed in parliament that his country had secretly built and then voluntarily dismantled six nuclear weapons. Cynics argue that the apartheid government’s motives were less altruistic, driven merely by the fear of atomic weapons in the hands of what would soon be a black government.

In the history of nuclear disarmament, only four countries have relinquished their nuclear weapons. Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine inherited their arsenal from the Soviet Union but lacked the resources and expertise to sustain them. South Africa is the only nation to have developed, controlled, and voluntarily disassembled its nuclear arsenal.