DRAWING LESSONS FROM THE CASE OF SOUTH AFRICAS DISARMAMENT FOR TODAY
Abstract
South Africa stands out as the only country to have given up indigenously produced nuclear weapons. It also allowed an unprecedented level of verification by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The case of South Africa’s nuclear disarmament in the late 1980s and early 1990s offers many lessons for achieving and monitoring denuclearization and non-proliferation activities in many states, including Iran and North Korea, today and in the future. Although many factors led to South Africa’s decision to abandon nuclear weapons, including governance changes, its experience has direct relevance to the difficult cases of Iran and North Korea as well as those of other states. A key lesson from the South African case applicable in particular to Iran is that disclosing past military nuclear activities is vital to regaining the trust of the international community and to the full removal of sanctions. There are also valuable lessons for the North Korean disarmament challenge, including the design of verification arrangements and assessment of their adequacy. More generally, ISIS believes that there are many current lessons to be learned from the experiences of South Africa. Drawing from historical experience, policymakers can better understand the motivations and constraints affecting how and why countries sought nuclear weapons or unsafeguarded fissile material production capabilities, and why they later abandoned their ambitions. Reviewing the South African case and publicizing new findings is also important to current efforts to ensure that secret nuclear activities are adequately revealed, that stocks of nuclear explosive materials are properly accounted for and disposed of, that effective international inspection regimes exist, and that adequate export control regimes are instituted. The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) has an unrivaled set of unpublished information about the South African nuclear weapons program, its dismantlement, and the IAEA verification effort. Much of this information resulted from the Principal Investigator’s (PI’s) work in the early 1990s as an unofficial advisor to the African National Congress’ Nuclear Policy Team, under a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Partly as a result, he was given unprecedented access in 1994 to former South African nuclear weapons production sites and former members of the program. He maintained contacts with the members for years, gaining more information and revisiting the production sites about ten years ago. As a result, the lessons in this project would be derived from a far more detailed portrait of the South African nuclear weapons program and its verified dismantlement than has been publicly available to date. ISIS thus proposes a one-year project to detail, review, and draw out lessons from the historical case of South African nuclear disarmament. The results of the study would be a day-long workshop gathering together experts on this case and a 100-page paper with annexes detailing findings and lessons for today’s proliferation cases. ISIS would widely disseminate and brief the results of the report to U.S. government policymakers, focusing in particular on how the findings apply to the current and future important nuclear non-proliferation cases, and share the findings with the wider non-governmental community. This effort will benefit the broader public by sharing information on key proliferation cases and contributing to efforts to build international initiatives and agreements which safeguard U.S. and international security. It woul
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 09, 2016
- Source ID
- N002441510005
Entities
People
- David Albright
Organizations
- Defense Threat Reduction Agency