South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction (review)

Helen Purkitt and Stephen Burgess's excellent study of South Africa's development and dismantlement of a weapons of mass destruction program is essential reading for anyone interested in South African politics or in the broader issues of the proliferation of such weapons. The authors have an ambitious agenda. They lay out in great detail the evolution of South Africa's weapons of mass destruction: nuclear, biological, and chemical. They situate the rise and decline of this program within extenuating political circumstances spanning almost a half-century. And they examine at least three levels of South Africa's security environment: the state, regional, and international. From an international relations perspective, they implicitly borrow from all three of Kenneth Walt's images or levels of analysis, namely, the individual, the state, and the international system.

The politics driving the narrative is clear. The authors emphasize that the trajectory and vicissitudes of South African politics explain much of the logic behind why and how South Africa developed weapons of mass destruction and later discarded them. They use important domestic watersheds, such as Sharpeville (1969), Soweto (1976), and the township disturbances (1984) to demonstrate how insecurity within South Africa shaped its security demands and led to weapons proliferation. Similarly, they earmark the important regional events, such as decolonization in southern Africa, the Angolan civil war, and the insurgency in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), and examine how they affected South Africa's perceptions of its security dilemma. Finally, the authors have an excellent grasp of how international influences affected the history of South Africa's weapons program.

The volume is less successful in examining the theoretical lessons we can glean from the South African case. The authors offer a collection of important theoretical points without systematically exploring them. They note in the introduction that several theoretical concepts from international relations—neorealist theory, organizational and bureaucratic politics, comparative foreign policy, psychological perspectives—are needed to explain South Africa's weapons of mass destruction program. But these "theories" are used in an anecdotal and ad hoc manner. This, unfortunately, weakens the volume's ability to frame a larger comparative research agenda. For instance, how do we compare Ukraine to South Africa? They have different security dilemmas (neorealism), different bureaucratic legacies and trajectories, and distinct psychological imperatives. Yet both unilaterally disarmed nuclear weapons programs.

Nonetheless, the volume offers important lessons from the South African case that can be applied to the broader context of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The appendix, for example, offers twenty-three policy lessons gleaned from the study. Any scholar—and, more important, any policymaker—would do well to read this list closely. The conclusion includes a sophisticated understanding of the changing security environment punctuated by 9/11. The discussion of transnational security threats, including al-Qaeda, offers some very interesting and creative insights. From this reviewer's perspective, the most interesting analytical and theoretical contribution, albeit underdeveloped, is the volume's understanding of the growing threat of weapons of mass destruction from nonstate actors. While the book is about a state, South Africa, it is also concerned with the shadowy world of transnational criminal organizations, terrorists, and arms merchants. This is the world that seems to represent the real threat posed by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and that offers areas of future research worth exploring.