South Africa's Weapons of Mass Destruction (review)

As the struggle in South Africa escalated in the 1960s and later, the apartheid regime secretly worked on nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons with the intention of staving off the "total onslaught" by using those weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) against internal and external enemies. Biological agents were frequently used, and perhaps chemical weapons also, though neighboring countries were spared having ANC camps obliterated with tactical nuclear weapons. By the 1990s, peaceful transition in South Africa led the government to dismantle its WMD capabilities and become a leader in world efforts to create and realize nonproliferation norms. Grounds for concern remain in unemployed experts willing to sell knowledge, right-wing and racist extremists, and disaffected Muslim youth in South Africa and elsewhere who may find detritus of the WMD programs useful and not impossible to obtain.

Purkitt and Burgess give a careful and valuable examination of the rise and fall of, and future prospects for, South Africa's WMDs, including nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, in a work that is an interesting combination of a theoretically informed political-science case study, a policy-oriented study drawing lessons for those attempting to avoid and/or curb the proliferation of such weapons, and an exercise in investigative reporting with considerable drama. The authors, political scientists working at military universities in the United States, augment an extensive knowledge of primary and secondary sources with around 200 interviews with key players to put together the best account available of the developments in this murky and still unfolding story. The work has problems, some intrinsic to the often clandestine subject matter, and some the result of difficulties in stitching together sections previously presented in other formats and venues (Purkitt and Burgess, 2001, 2002a, 2002b). Even so, the work is highly recommended as an excellent beginning to understanding this episode in South Africa's history and the broader question of how we may prevent the proliferation of WMDs.

Difficulties intrinsic to the subject-matter arise from the information available, at once extensive and inadequate. As the end of the WMD era drew to a close, some 12,000 pages of documents were shredded. Players in the WMD operation were often unknown to each other, shrouded in veils of secrecy, carrying on lucrative side deals under the table, or hiding evidence in hopes of using it to secure futures elsewhere. Remaining uncertainties about the facts leave parts of this book full of variations on phrases like "it is alleged that," or "has not been established," or "may have been," or "it is quite possible that." The authors fill in gaps in the documentary record through extensive interviewing, but several of their informants asked for anonymity, leaving the reader uncertain of the authority with which they speak. The authors are meticulous in reporting lapses of that kind, but the reader is often left uncertain what in the evidence is conjectural. The damage to the presentation should not be exaggerated: overall, a clear outline emerges, even if some features remain unclear.

Difficulties in stitching previously presented pieces into a seamless book are of two kinds. Most bothersome to the reader looking for a compelling narrative, but least damaging to the analysis, is the unneeded repetition of some parts from chapter to chapter. More serious is what feels like a late addition of theory to turn this into a theoretically informed case study. The theory sometimes seems more a ribbon tied around the tapestry than the warp and woof of it. The authors argue that for this case the Neo-Realist canon in International Relations needs augmentation with less state-centric analyses, including organizational politics, political psychology, and insights from comparative foreign policy. Clearly, the methodological difficulties are extreme in sorting out several theoretical approaches using one case study (and that one a "most likely case" for domestic influences, given the change of the regime in 1994) and brief mentions of other cases. The theoretical analysis submerges for...