South Africa stands alone as the only nation on Earth to have forged its own nuclear arsenal and then, by its own free will, dismantled every last device

South Africa stands alone as the only nation on Earth to have forged its own nuclear arsenal and then, by its own free will, dismantled every last device.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, under the apartheid regime, South African scientists and engineers secretly assembled six complete gun-type nuclear devices (and a seventh partially completed) at facilities near Pretoria, drawing on indigenous uranium enrichment at Valindaba and the expertise built at Pelindaba.

These were not inherited hand-me-downs from a collapsing empire; they were indigenously designed and built weapons of an African state, conceived as a political deterrent amid Cold War regional conflicts.

By early 1991 the devices had been taken apart, the highly enriched uranium melted down and placed under safeguards, and the production lines destroyed. President F.W. de Klerk publicly confirmed the programme’s existence in March 1993; the International Atomic Energy Agency later verified the complete dismantlement the only such IAEA-confirmed elimination of an indigenous arsenal to date.

South Africa acceded to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as a non-nuclear-weapon state in 1991 and later became the first former nuclear-armed state to ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

This was an act of African agency at the precise moment the country was casting off minority rule and reclaiming its place among free nations. The decision, taken before the 1994 democratic transition, removed any possibility that nuclear weapons would become a tool of the new majority-rule government or a bargaining chip in the hands of the old order.

It cleared the path for the continent-wide African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty the Treaty of Pelindaba adopted in 1995 at the very site where South Africa’s devices had been developed.

Named for the research complex whose Zulu-derived name evokes “the end of the story,” the treaty binds African states against developing, testing, stationing or acquiring nuclear explosives and has helped keep the entire continent free of nuclear weapons.