When chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix delivered a report to the United Nations Security Council last month, he mentioned that a delegation from South Africa had visited Iraqi officials to explain how South Africa had dismantled its small nuclear arsenal in the early 1990s.
As the deadlines for Iraq to dismantle its weapons of mass destruction gets closer and the threat of war grows stronger, experts are using the South African experience as an example of how disarmament should be carried out.
They are also looking back at the lessons learned from South Africa’s decision to build and then later destroy its seven nuclear weapons for ideas about how to deal with Iraq and other nuclear powers, such as North Korea, India and Pakistan.
Starting in 1979, South Africa developed six complete nuclear weapons and had a seventh partially built when the decision to dismantle came in 1990. While the U.S. and others knew the South Africans had nuclear weapons, the South African government did not publicly admit having had them until 1993, after they were destroyed.
In a 1995 paper prepared when he was an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Frank Pabian studied the South African nuclear experience to see what lesson the United States could learn.
“When a country’s determination to have nuclear weapons is driven by a perception of a powerful threat to its security, non-proliferation policy measures–like export controls and trade sanctions–may do little to stop its program efforts until those security threats are diminished,” Pabian wrote.
In the mid-1970s, South Africa found itself increasingly isolated in the world because of its apartheid policies at a time when other countries in the region were increasingly unstable.
In Cold War crossfire
The withdrawal of Portugal from its former colonies in Angola and Mozambique placed both new nations in the Cold War crossfire between the Soviet Union and the United States. The Soviets and Cubans backed the new governments in both countries; at the same time, black liberation forces were fighting the white government in South Africa’s neighbor Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Under those circumstances, Pabian argued, South Africa saw the need for nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
In the case of Iraq, the United States has argued that Saddam Hussein seeks to develop nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction so his regime can dominate the Middle East.
As has happened with Iraq, early sanctions against South Africa failed to stop the drive to build nuclear and other weapons.
“If anything sanctions seem to have reinforced South Africa’s determination to have the bomb,” Pabian wrote. “Only when internal political reform had reduced its isolation from the world community was it ready to abandon the program.”
He concluded that there were steps the United States could take that would make it less likely that Iraq, Iran or North Korea would feel the need to seek nuclear weapons in the first place.
“One application of this lesson would be that when (and if) a more secure regional military environment is established in the Middle East, or South Asia, the opportunities for nuclear non-proliferation success will be greater in those regions as well.”
Pabian concluded that determined nations–South Africa, Pakistan, India and now Iraq–found ways to circumvent export controls designed to prevent them from acquiring material needed to build nuclear weapons, so these curbs alone can not be expected to stop countries from building a bomb.
Confrontation and humiliation were ineffective tactics as well, Pabian concluded.
When the Soviet Union revealed evidence of nuclear testing being carried out by South Africa, the drive to build a nuclear weapon was accelerated.
“This was quite similar to the situation that developed in Iraq, whereby the Iraqi nuclear weapon program was significantly stimulated (and made more covert) following the bombing of the Osirak reactor by Israel in 1981,” Pabian noted.
The Bush administration’s policies toward Israel and the Palestinians are often cited–sometimes disingenuously–as the heart of the regional crisis in the Middle East. While not drawing a specific comparison with Iraq, Pabian said that one lesson from the South African experience was that disarmament and non-proliferation worked best once wider regional problems are resolved.
He said the politics and posturing of the Cold War era not only led South Africa to develop nuclear weapons, but also limited options the U.S. had to pressure South Africa’s leadership.
“Only after success in the Cold War was achieved–and with it the removal of South Africa’s external security threat (the raison d’etre of its nuclear weapon program)–was the internal political reform conducive to de-nuclearization finally possible,” he wrote.
“But, more broadly, the South African case illustrates the unavoidable difficulties that can arise on the road to achieving U.S. non-proliferation goals when these goals remain subordinate to, or even in conflict with, larger policies issues.”
Now experts look at South Africa’s disarmament as a model.
“South Africa bent over backward to be transparent,” said David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington. “The South Africans did not have to provide as much information as they did.”
Iraq does too little
The government invited inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect all nuclear facilities and records of the destruction program.
“That is really what the Bush administration is talking about,” he said. “They [South Africa] did it voluntarily, and that is the way it should be done now. Iraq will do something, but just too little.”
Some suggest that South Africa dismantled its nuclear weapons program in part because the white minority government wanted to deny those weapons to some future black majority government.
But Albright said that was not the entire story.
President F.W. de Klerk “could not conceptualize that he [or other whites] would not have power,” Albright said. He said some white government officials did not want the African National Congress to have access to nuclear weapons, but there were also members of the ANC who very much wanted them as they anticipated black majority rule.
“Some in the ANC were disappointed that they were not inheriting a nuclear arsenal,” Albright said.
“One of the most interesting things is that some of the inspectors now in Iraq were also involved in the South Africa inspections,” said an expert in nuclear non-proliferation efforts who asked not to be named. “There was a lot of pressure on de Klerk to come clean.
“They didn’t have to be public about it, but they decided it was in their own best interests to come clean about what they had done,” the expert said.
