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T W O South Africa in a World of Proliferating Weapons The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and thus we drift toward unparalleled catastrophes. —Ralph E. Lapp1 The world has lived with weapons of mass destruction for more than half a century. They remain a grave concern for humanity. Five states openly developed nuclear weapons in the 1940s and 1950s, and at least four more, including South Africa, developed them covertly in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.2 More than a dozen states, including South Africa, covertly developed biological-weapons programs, and more than a dozen, including South Africa, developed chemical weapons programs. Nuclear weapons were used twice in August 1945 against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and were never used again, presumably because of their devastating impact.3 Battlefield nuclear weapons were developed but have never been used, due to morality issues and the danger of escalation into full-scale nuclear war.4 Biological and chemical weapons have been used more frequently than nuclear weapons because they can be employed on a smaller scale on the battlefield, for assassinations, and to neutralize terrorists who hold large numbers of civilian hostages. Chemical weapons have been used to poison enemy soldiers as well as civilian noncombatants. Iraq used chemical weapons in the 1980s to kill and wound thousands of Iranian troops and thousands of Iraqi Kurdish villagers. At the end of 2002, Russian Special Forces used an incapacitating gas to neutralize Chechen rebels holding 700 civilian hostages in a Moscow theater before storming the theater; however, 115 hostages were killed in the rescue attempt.5 Alleged incidents of the use of biological weapons are difficult to document . Only Japan’s experiments with biowarfare in the 1940s to infect hundreds of Chinese noncombatants are well documented. Other experiments using cholera and other agents as part of counterinsurgency warfare against demands for independence throughout Africa and Asia starting in the 1960s have proved more difficult to document.6 Until recently, it was widely believed that there had never been a successful attempt to use biological agents as weapons against political opponents in the United States.7 However, the anthrax-letter attacks of October 2001 in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York changed the conventional wisdom and brought to national prominence an awareness that there have been other attempts in the United States to use biological agents in recent years. Today , most Americans are aware that there may be future biowarfare attacks in their local communities. When the focus shifts from the use of biological agents by nonstate actors to why political leaders of nation-states decide to develop weapons of mass destruction, neorealist theory offers the most comprehensive explanation for why states have developed weapons of mass destruction from 1914 onward. This theory assumes that states behave as rational actors who pursue their self-interest, including the vital interests of survival and maximizing national power.8 Neorealists such as Kenneth Waltz and John Mearsheimer, like classical realists, emphasize that countries seek to maximize their national interests using a variety of means.9 Neorealist theory contends that states first develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons in order to maximize power and win wars but later use them for deterrence and defense. Neorealists theorize that as rivals developed weapons of mass destruction and less powerful states, such as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, rose to challenge the United States, weapons of mass destruction were desired by Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and other challengers of the United States in order to provide the means to deter stronger adversaries and ensure regime survival. The modern history of the use of weapons of mass destruction begins in World War I, when chemical weapons were first developed and used by Germany, the United Kingdom, France, and other states to disrupt large troop formations and gain advantage and achieve eventual victory on the battlefield.10 While more than 100,000 soldiers were killed and a million injured by mustard gas and other chemical weapons, ultimately they did not prove decisive or reliable.11 The horrors created by chemical weapons in World War I led to the 1925 Geneva Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating , Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare , which forbids the use of chemical and biological weapons in warfare. In spite of the protocol, a number of states, including South Africa, developed and stockpiled chemical weapons and many...

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