In 1986, Libyan terrorists had bombed a West German discotheque, killing a U.S. soldier and a Turkish woman and injuring over 120 (40 of them Americans). In response, Reagan ordered the bombing of Libyan barracks and airfields, just missing Qaddafi himself. Qaddafi answered that bombing by downing Pan Am flight 103 on December 21, 1988, days before the end of Reagan’s term of office. After these violent interchanges and sponsorship of terrorism worldwide, what made Libya decide to abandon its nascent nuclear program in 2003?
Though negotiations had been going on for years, and were tied to a settlement of Libyan liability for the Pan Am bombing, it seems clear that the factor uppermost in Qaddafi’s decision was fear that his country would be next after Iraq on the allied coalition target list. Libya committed to dismantling its WMD programs within days of America’s “shock and awe” air assault on Iraq in March 2003. As Dr. Johnson famously quipped, “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”
South Africa, on the other hand, already was a nuclear-weapon state when it voluntarily disarmed. It began a commercial nuclear program in the 1950s under Atoms for Peace, and by 1965 could produce enriched uranium for a bomb. South Africa’s military nuclear program began in 1974, following the Carnation Revolution in Portugal that brought decolonization—and with it, instability—to the region. With Marxist dictators seizing power in neighboring countries in the years following—in Mozambique and Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia)—South Africa had no incentive to disarm.
Also significant for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program was its relationship with Israel. After the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Israel’s formerly warm relations with pro-Arab African nations came unglued, Israel turned to South Africa as its supplier of uranium ore, which it is unable to mine domestically. Israel reportedly traded its design expertise to enable the South Africans to build gun-type uranium A-bombs in return for uranium to make atomic bomb “primary” triggers for “secondary” hydrogen bombs.
Weapons designers Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman (The Nuclear Express) believe that Israel also wanted from South Africa a clandestine site to test a neutron bomb, presumably for use against Egyptian and Syrian tank assault in event of a repeat of their 1973 surprise attack. They note that it took China, a sophisticated nuclear-club member, five tests to get a working neutron bomb. They conclude that Israel tested a neutron bomb 1,500 miles southeast of Cape Town on September 22, 1979, to make it appear to outside observers as a South African test. The signals matched French weapons, but Israel, as noted earlier, obtained weapons expertise from France.[52]
The Soviets were energetically backing Communist “liberation” movements in Africa, all of which South Africa adamantly opposed. Evidence of a South African nuclear test would have strengthened South Africa’s hand in supporting regional allies against Russia’s Marxist proxies. In 1976 the Soviets persuaded the U.S. to cooperate in pressuring South Africa not to conduct a nuclear test at its Valindaba site. (Reed and Stillman drily note that in Zulu the word means, “We do not talk about this at all.”) By 1978 Valindaba was producing enough highly enriched uranium to make one bomb per year, and when P. W. Botha succeeded John Vorster that year as prime minister, he pressed for more. In the 1980s South Africa produced six uranium gun-trigger devices. Needing no testing, these enabled South Africa to go nuclear without alerting the world and risking nonproliferation blowback.
By the mid-1980s the Cuban-backed Marxist rebels were making progress in the ex-Portuguese colony Angola—just north of the guerrillas fighting South African control of South West Africa (now Namibia). South Africa reportedly had contingency plans to use a uranium bomb on Luanda, the Angolan capital, in event of war.
In 1989 F. W. De Klerk became South African head of state, and oversaw the end of apartheid. In November 1989 he ordered Valindaba to be closed and his country’s half-dozen uranium bombs dismantled. By September 1991 the task was done. His apparent motivations were to end international isolation and to prevent nuclear weapons from falling under control of a black African leader. This despite the evident fact that the new South African leader, Nelson Mandela, was as unlikely as anyone on the planet to use nuclear weapons.
South Africa’s decision had two real-world impacts: it reduced weapons-grade nuclear material suitable for theft, and it was a political symbol of voluntary nuclear disarmament as the Cold War ended. But several thousand South African nuclear scientists were now seeking new employment, joining thousands of jobless Russian scientists. They were ripe for picking by nuclear aspirants.
Former Russian Republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan
THE MOST significant voluntary disarmament moves were made in three republics formerly part of the Soviet Union: Ukraine, Belarus, and Muslim-majority Kazakhstan. The prime incentive these nascent countries had for surrendering their arsenals was that it would facilitate separation from post-Soviet Russia. They had no great incentive to keep them—using them against the West or against Russia would surely have resulted in their own destruction.
Securing their nuclear material against diversion by hostile states or sophisticated terrorist groups proved a grand challenge. Once again, The Nuclear Express provides unmatched narrative detail, in this case, on the technology and logistics of securing nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. The scale of the problem was breathtaking.
Between entering the atomic age in 1949 and its year-end breakup in 1991, the USSR produced 1,200 metric tons of highly enriched uranium and 140 to 162 metric tons of plutonium reprocessed from nuclear reactor waste. If a tenth of a percent of the material went missing, there would be 1.3 tons of weapons-grade uranium and 310–360 pounds of weapons-grade plutonium loose in the world, enough for dozens of nuclear bombs.
Further, as the Soviet Union dissolved there were still some 27,000 Soviet nuclear weapons—including 11,000 thermonuclear ones—to be dismantled, much of this arsenal located in the three former Soviet republics. Having been part of the former Soviet Union, and thus parties to the 1991 START I Treaty, they agreed to transfer their entire arsenals to Russia. Of the three, Belarus had the fewest weapons—81 warheads on mobile ICBMs (an arsenal nearly as large as that of India or Pakistan). Ukraine’s immense arsenal of 5,000 nuclear warheads—several times larger than the arsenals of Great Britain and France combined—made it the world’s third-largest nuclear power. And Kazakhstan had nearly 2,000 warheads—including an estimated 1,000 multi-megaton warheads sitting on the monster SS-18, the largest ICBM ever built.
Kazakhstan faced even thornier problems than disposing of weapons. Its nuclear test area underwent 456 tests in 41 years, the highest number of tests for one test site, massively contaminating the test site soil. Worse, Kazakhstan had to find a way to rid itself of its weapons-grade uranium used in Russian nuclear submarines. In late 1994 the U.S. sent massive military cargo planes on a secret airlift mission to Kazakhstan to pack up and remove the fuel. In an operation that equaled anything Hollywood could serve up, they succeeded in getting their cargo out just before Iranian buyers could get their hands on the stuff for use in crude uranium “gun-trigger” devices.
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For more on the detective work that found Israel the likely candidate responsible for the test, see source notes at www.SleepwalkBomb.com. Reed and Stillman argue that the Carter administration—to avoid roiling the political climate in the Mideast after the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt were signed in 1978—whitewashed the 1979 nuclear test event and produced a finding of no nuclear test.