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For more than a decade the South African apartheid government developed its nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons programs in secret. Only those who worked directly on the programs or oversaw their strategic direction, including at least the state president and the minister of defense, knew the details of their existence. In 1993 President F. W. de Klerk announced publicly that South Africa had pursued a program to develop nuclear warheads; until then rumors of it had been unsubstantiated. It was even later, in 1996, that details of the country’s chemical and biological weapons programs, referred to as Project Coast, its apartheid-era code name, became public. By 2005, a fairly detailed record of the evolution, history, and dismantlement of South Africa’s NBC programs existed.1 It showed that the factor most influential in motivating the decision to develop them was the perception that the apartheid state was existentially threatened by internal and external forces. Other factors, such as the availability of technical and scientific expertise , access to raw materials and equipment, and the willingness of scientists to cooperate, also played an important role in creating the conditions in which the decision to proliferate could be made. The policy response to this threat analysis identified the importance of a nuclear deterrent capability and the need to be able to respond to a chemical weapons attack and to improve the means for crowd control within South Africa. Although military and political leaders were motivated by the need to counter the threat to the state, the programs were driven more immediately by the motivations of individuals to test the limits of science and resourcefulness in a country increasingly isolated from the rest of the world. 4 Motivations and Means: Scientists in Apartheid South Africa’s Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons Programs and Relevance for UNSCR 1540 sarah meek and chandré gould 54 04-1017-8 CH 04 1/10/07 12:20 PM Page 54 This chapter focuses on the role of scientists in the establishment and development of apartheid South Africa’s NBC programs. It attempts to understand the factors that influenced the decisionmaking process in relation to the initiation and development of those programs and the role that scientists played. The conclusions it reaches suggest how international measures such as United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1540 of April 28, 2004, and the existing international treaty framework covering nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons can contribute to preventing the further proliferation of these weapons, and they also point to those measures’ limitations. The chapter briefly sets out the history of the South African nuclear weapons program and the chemical and biological weapons programs, which followed significantly different courses during their establishment and dismantlement. The common denominator is the role of scientists and other skilled professionals , who were able to manipulate the programs to suit their interests and who developed the knowledge and skills necessary to establish and run them. The chapter concludes by identifying lessons from the South African experience for other countries engaged in activities that may skirt the limits of acceptability under international non-proliferation and disarmament regimes. These lessons also apply to countries in which proliferation activities are outside the purview of national regimes, which nonetheless now face having to implement UNSCR 1540. South Africa during Apartheid During the 1970s threats, whether real or perceived, to the existence of the apartheid state increased dramatically. Before 1974 South Africa had been buffered from the rest of the continent by its neighbors, which were still under colonial rule. But this changed when in that year the Portuguese government fell in a coup. In 1975 Mozambique and Angola gained independence, and the South African armed forces invaded Angola but were forced to withdraw. Their response was to rearm and reorganize the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola and thereby destabilize the government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). The change in the external threat to the apartheid state was mirrored by a simultaneous increase in the internal resistance to apartheid, and by the late 1970s the South African government and military viewed these threats as a “total onslaught”against the country.According to the defense minister Magnus Malan in 1977, this onslaught “involves so many different fronts, unknown to the South African experience, that it has gained the telling but horrifying name of total war. This different but all-encompassing war has Scientists in Apartheid South Africa’s NBC Programs 55 04-1017...

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