The question of whether Africa possesses nuclear weapons is complex, rooted in historical developments and ongoing efforts towards disarmament. While there are no active nuclear weapons programs on the continent today, understanding the history and current stance requires a closer look.
Countries shaded in green have signed and ratified the Treaty of Pelindaba.
Africa as a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone
Today, all African states except South Sudan are members of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. Furthermore, sufficient support for the Pelindaba Treaty, an agreement among African states that prohibits the acquisition, stockpiling, testing, and other activities that promote nuclear weapons or assist in their production, has turned the continent into a Nuclear Weapons Free Zone.
Nuclear weapons may seem to be an issue far removed from Africa’s immediate security concerns, which are rather centered on small arms, intra-state conflict and human security issues. However, nuclear weapons matter to every country in the world because they pose a threat on three grounds.
- Firstly, nations that have them are disregarding arms control agreements.
- Secondly, they are pursuing technologies that have increased the risk of nuclear war in an era of increasing geopolitical tension - particularly between China, the US and Russia.
African countries have a role to play in promoting a total ban on nuclear weapons.
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The Cold War Context
Nuclear weapons were a main component of the Cold War, an ideological conflict that raged from the 1950s to 1990 between the Western and Eastern blocs of states. It was led by the US and the Soviet Union, respectively. Even then a clear understanding took root that nuclear war could not be won and must never be fought.
A limited exchange of 100 nuclear bombs of the kind in the arsenals of the world’s nuclear armed states - the United States, Russia, France, the United Kingdom, China, Pakistan, India, North Korea and Israel - would cause millions of deaths in the targeted areas. The fires that result from it could cause a nuclear winter that would block out the sun and cause all humans to go extinct.
To avoid nuclear war, some strategists propose the doctrine of nuclear deterrence. This holds that the only use for nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear weapons attack from an adversary by assuring a retaliatory attack. Such mutually assured destruction, they argue, will deter states from actually using the bomb on each other.
But the concept has many flaws, including assuming that all nuclear-armed states and individual decision-makers sign up to its logic, and that they have perfect information about the nuclear decisions of adversaries. It also wrongfully assumes that accidents, misunderstandings or sheer madness would not set off a nuclear exchange.
To respond to these flaws during the Cold War, states pursued arms control agreements and confidence building arrangements. Arms control refers to restrictions that states agree to place on the development, testing, possession, deployment and use of certain weapons.
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The 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty restricts the spread of nuclear weapons to more than the five states that had tested them by 1967 - the US, Russia, the UK, France and China. This, in exchange for a commitment towards nuclear disarmament negotiations and the cessation of the nuclear arms race.
The resultant treaties between these two states reduced nuclear weapons, but were only half measures in two respects. Firstly, they were premised on a step-by-step reduction approach, rather than a one-off ban approach. Secondly, the US and Russia also assumed that nuclear dominance would remain their prerogative.
Today many of these treaties have been terminated, and reductions have slowed to a trickle, with more than 13,000 nuclear warheads still in existence.
One of the premises of deterrence is that nuclear armed states must be vulnerable to attack. But anti-ballistic missile defence systems, such as the the Aegis system, deployed by the US and Japan, counter this vulnerability. If states think that their retaliatory strikes might be intercepted by missile defence systems, they hedge by acquiring more nuclear weapons to deter their adversaries’ first strike.
States are also developing hypersonic missiles that can outsmart defence systems by flying fast and low. And they are manoeuvrable.
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Most nuclear weapons states are increasing or modernising their arsenals in breach of disarmament norms and obligations in the Non Proliferation Treaty. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists included these concerns when it adjusted its Doomsday clock - to show how much closer humanity is to destroying the world with its own technologies than at any time in its history.
Scientists and analysts in this field are thus warning politicians and the public that urgent action is needed to avoid nuclear war.
One silver lining in recent years was the negotiation of a treaty that bans nuclear weapons once and for all - the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The so-called “Ban Treaty” resulted from the humanitarian initiative, a concerted effort by activist states and civil society to highlight the humanitarian consequences of using nuclear weapons.
The treaty entered into force in January 2021, a major diplomatic achievement that reflects global public opinion in favour of the abolition of nuclear weapons. However, the nuclear-armed states and some of their allies boycotted the process, and have actively tried to undermine the treaty.
Because they haven’t joined the treaty, it is not legally binding on them. African states and civil society played an important role in the Ban Treaty process, but need to keep the momentum by asserting Africa’s role on this issue. They should also encourage more states to join the treaty, especially African states - only nine are members. With every state that joins, the value of the Ban Treaty grows.
South Africa's Nuclear History
Unlike many other countries' nuclear weapons doctrine, South Africa's strategy anticipated no actual battlefield use of nuclear weapons. Although the weapons were intended to be used as a basis for a bluff of its antagonists, South Africa had to be perceived as having the means and resolve to use nuclear weapons in a military conflict.
Such a capability could be used to manipulate other, allied Western powers (primarily the United States) to assist South Africa against any overwhelming military threat to its sovereignty, such as if Soviet-backed forces were to overrun South African Defence Forces in Angola and then invade South Africa itself. The "Strategic Uncertainty" phase would include a policy of deliberate ambiguity, with South Africa neither affirming or denying its nuclear capabilities.
The "Covert Condition" phase would occur if South African territorial integrity was threatened by the Soviet Union or Soviet-backed forces.
The South African covert nuclear weapons production line and high security storage vaults were located in the Kentron Circle building on the Gerotek vehicle testing facility owned by Armscor on the outskirts of Pretoria. At its secret opening ceremony on 4 May 1981, Prime Minister P.W. Botha declared:
"The time has come when the South African "Plowshare" must be forged into a sword, for the battle that awaits ... a weapon of inducement, persuasion, and compulsion in the hands of the leaders of the world."
South Africa developed a small finite deterrence arsenal of gun-type fission weapons in the 1980s. The cornerstone control feature was for each nuclear device to be divided into two subsections, a Front End and a Back End, with the HEU split between the two.
The fully assembled gun-type devices had enough HEU that they were near critical mass after final assembly. A major safety concern was the Back End propellant could prematurely fire, sending the projectile into the Front End and causing an accidental nuclear explosion. To prevent this, only after the device was armed and ready for use would the barrel rotate to line up the openings correctly.
In 1982, Armscor built the first operational weapon, code-named Hobo and later called Cabot. This device reportedly had a yield of 6 kilotons of TNT. It was eventually disassembled and the warhead reused in a production model bomb. Armscor then built a series of pre-production and production models under the code-name Hamerkop (a bird).
The South African Atomic Energy Board (AEB) selected a test site in the Kalahari Desert at the Vastrap weapons range north of Upington. Two test shafts were completed in 1976 and 1977. One shaft was 385 metres deep, the other, 216 metres.
In mid-1977, the AEB produced a gun-type device-without a highly enriched uranium (HEU) core. Although the Y-Plant was operating, it had not yet produced enough weapons-grade uranium for a device. Atomic Energy Commission officials say that a "cold test" (a test without uranium-235) was planned for August 1977.
The Soviet and Western governments were convinced that South Africa was preparing for a full-scale nuclear test. During the next two weeks in August, the Western nations pressed South Africa not to test. In 1993, Wynand de Villiers said that when the test site was exposed, he ordered its immediate shutdown. The site was abandoned and the holes sealed.
The warheads were originally configured to be delivered from one of several aircraft types then in service with the South African Air Force (SAAF), including the Canberra B12 and the Hawker Siddeley Buccaneer. The missiles were to be based on the RSA-3 and RSA-4 launchers that had already been built and tested for the South African space programme.
Following the decision in 1989 to cancel the nuclear weapons program, the missile programs were allowed to continue until 1992, when military funding ended, and all ballistic missile work was stopped by mid-1993.
In September 1979, a US Vela satellite detected a double flash over the Indian Ocean that was suspected, but never confirmed, to be a nuclear test, despite extensive air sampling by WC-135 aircraft of the United States Air Force. If the Vela incident was a nuclear test, South Africa is virtually the only possible country, potentially in collaboration with Israel, which could have carried it out.
In February 1994, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, former commander of South Africa's Simon's Town naval base who was later convicted of spying for the USSR, was reported to have said:
"Although I was not directly involved in planning or carrying out the operation, I learned unofficially that the flash was produced by an Israeli-South African test code-named Operation Phoenix. The explosion was clean and was not supposed to be detected."
In 2010, The Guardian released South African government documents that confirmed the existence of Israel's nuclear arsenal. According to The Guardian, the documents were associated with an Israeli offer to sell South Africa nuclear weapons in 1975. Israel categorically denied these allegations and claimed the documents do not indicate any offer for a sale of nuclear weapons.
According to David Albright and Andrea Strickner, South Africa also engaged in close, long-term cooperation with Taiwan, which at the time was controlled by the autocratic Kuomintang regime, sometimes along with the Israelis. In 1980 the Taiwanese contracted for 4,000 tons of uranium metal although it is not known how much of this order was ever delivered. In 1983 Taiwan and South Africa agreed to cooperate on laser enrichment, chemical enrichment, and building a small reactor. The South African reactor program was slowed down in 1985 due to budget cuts and was cancelled completely half a decade later.
South African forces feared the threat of a "domino effect" in favor of communism, represented in southern Africa by Cuban forces in Angola, aiding Angolan Marxist-Leninist revolutionary groups against rivals supported by South African forces, and threatening Namibia.
Dismantlement and Non-Proliferation Efforts
The pre-emptive elimination of nuclear weapons was expected to make a significant contribution toward regional stability and peace, and also to help restore South Africa's credibility in regional and international politics. F.W. de Klerk saw the presence of nuclear weapons in South Africa as a problem.
South Africa ended its nuclear weapons programme in 1989. All the bombs (six constructed and one under construction) were dismantled and South Africa acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1991. As a result, the IAEA was satisfied that South Africa's nuclear programme had been converted to peaceful applications.
Following this, South Africa joined the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) as a full member on 5 April 1995. South Africa played a leading role in the establishment of the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty (also referred to as the Treaty of Pelindaba) in 1996, becoming one of the first members in 1997.
The Treaty of Pelindaba came into effect on 15 July 2009 once it had been ratified by 28 countries. This treaty requires that parties will not engage in the research, development, manufacture, stockpiling acquisition, testing, possession, control or stationing of nuclear explosive devices in the territory of parties to the treaty and the dumping of radioactive wastes in the African zone by treaty parties.
Project Coast: Chemical and Biological Warfare Program
In October 1998, the report of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission publicly revealed Project Coast, a clandestine government chemical and biological warfare program conducted during the 1980s and 1990s. The program reported to the South African Defence Force Surgeon General (Maj. Gen. N. J. Nieuwoudt (1980-1988) and Maj. Gen. D.P. Knobel (1988-1998)).
Nieuwoudt recruited South African cardiologist and army officer Brig. Wouter Basson to head Project Coast. After Basson's arrest in 1997, documents found in his possession revealed that the "dirty-tricks" products included anthrax-laced cigarettes, household items contaminated with organophosphates and paraoxon-laced gin and whisky.
Other unverified claims include that a so-called infertility toxin was introduced into black townships, and that cholera was deliberately introduced into the water sources of some South African villages.
In January 1992, the government of Mozambique alleged that either South Africa, or South African backed RENAMO forces deployed an artillery-delivered airburst chemical weapon during a battle at a rebel base in Tete province. Five soldiers were said to have died, and many more were injured. South African military and civilian doctors collected samples from the Mozambican government, and denied any involvement in the matter.
| Country | First Test | Estimated Warheads |
|---|---|---|
| United States | 1945 | 5,044 |
| Russia | 1949 | 5,580 |
| United Kingdom | 1952 | 225 |
| France | 1960 | 290 |
| China | 1964 | 500 |
| India | 1974 | 172 |
| Pakistan | 1998 | 170 |
| North Korea | 2006 | 30 |
| Israel | (assumed) | 90 |
How South Africa Built Its Nuclear Weapons
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