The Treaty of Pelindaba on the African by United Nations

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However, the programme began to be a cause of alarm in the 1970s when in defence of its policy of apartheid South Africa embarked on an arms build-up aimed at intimidating other African States and thus facilitating its policy of surrounding itself with a cordon sanitaire. That build-up and the increasing hostility towards its neighbours became pronounced when the gaining of independence by the countries of Southern Africa from British and Portuguese colonial and racist policies left South Africa alone in the sub-region.

The nuclear-weapon States that were the proponents of preventing additional States from acquiring nuclear weapons did not press for preventing the geographical spread of their own weapons because of Cold War security interests. NATO, which feared the conventional arms superiority of the Warsaw Pact, had envisaged the deployment of nuclear weapons on the territories of its members close to the East as a counterbalance to the latter. This had been the main reason for opposition to the Rapazcki Plan for the establishment of a NWFZ in Central Europe.

That the African suspicion was well founded became clear in the post-Cold War years. Evidence of collaboration has since been documented in the postapartheid years in some writings on the nuclear programme. In an article entitled “De Klerk’s three nuclear lies”, Paul Stober quoted transcripts from the secret trial of Brigadier General Johann Blaauw of the South African Air Force in 1989 which showed that President De Klerk lied on three counts, 39 when, speaking in Parliament on March 24, 1993 about South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme, he asserted that: - South Africa had not acquired nuclear weapons technology or material from another country; South Africa had never provided nuclear material to another country; South Africa had never cooperated with another country in this regard.