South Africa and weapons of mass destruction

Rare card · No. 72428

From the 1960s to the 1990s, South Africa pursued research into weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons under the apartheid government. South Africa is one of the ten states to ever acquire a nuclear weapons capability, and the only state to relinquish them. South Africa's nuclear weapons doctrine was designed for political leverage rather than actual battlefield use, specifically to induce the United States to intervene in any regional conflicts between South Africa and the Soviet Union or its proxies. To achieve a minimum credible deterrence, a total of six nuclear weapons were covertly assembled by the late 1980s. Before the anticipated changeover to a majority-elected African National Congress-led government in the 1990s, the South African government dismantled all of its nuclear weapons. The country has been a signatory of the Biological Weapons Convention since 1975, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons since 1991, and the...

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