South Africa is the only country in the world ever to have begun a home-grown nuclear weapons program, produced its own bombs, and then completely disarmed itself. The decision to undertake a nuclear weapons program was made in 1977, when South Africa's internal and international situation looked particularly bleak. In creating a "strategic deterrent capability", the government's plan was first neither to confirm nor deny that it was capable of using nuclear weapons, then in the case of a severe security threat, (e.g. an overland invasion from Angola) to inform the major world powers secretly that the RSA did have its own nuclear weapons, and finally to demonstrate that fact with an underground explosion of a nuclear device at a test site in the Kalahari Desert. ARMSCOR, the government-owned arms corporation, was assigned the task of actually building the weapons and the first functional device was completed in December 1982. (Many sources assert that a strange "double flash" phenomenon in the Indian Ocean observed by satellite on 22 September 1979 was a test of a South African nuclear weapon. This is highly unlikely since no fallout was ever detected from this event, and since South Africa did not even have enough enriched uranium to fill such a weapon until the end of 1979. (Ed. note: It is now believed that the flash was due to a meteor strike.) One device was built each year for the next five years, giving the RSA an arsenal of six small weapons, but no offensive tactical role was ever contemplated for them - they were meant to be exploded underground as demonstrations of the country's deterrent capability. It was obvious that any offensive use of nuclear weapons would have invited retaliation from the Soviet Union and possibly other nuclear powers as well. By the late 1980s, the changed internal and international situation made South Africa's nuclear capability redundant. President De Klerk declared his intention to terminate the weapons program soon after his election in 1989. By June 1991, all six devices had been dismantled and the RSA acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty the following month. The genie had been put back in the bottle. Back to South African National Defense Force Back to Cry Havoc #24 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1998 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com