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O N E Introduction: The Ongoing Problem of South Africa’s Unconventional Weapons In the 1970s and 1980s, apartheid South Africa secretly developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction (and several launch vehicles to deliver them).1 South Africa’s covert programs fit the pattern of states, mainly in the Middle East and Asia, which secretly developed weapons of mass destruction during a period of heightened international tensions and in defiance of the 1970 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, the 1972 Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and an emerging sanctions regime. Yet in the 1990s, South Africa became the first known state to dismantle its nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Experts continue to disagree about which factors best account for the decision of the former South African regime to dismantle some of its covert weapons programs, but there is general agreement that the decisions were a response to changes in the international, regional, and domestic environment. Most analysts also agree that sustained pressures by Western countries, especially the United States, played a key role in the decision to close down the secret biological and chemical weapons program called Project Coast and may have played a behind-the-scenes role in pressuring the de Klerk government to close down the nuclear-bomb program as well. Western pressures, the need to free up resources for domestic reforms , limited consumer demand for commercial satellite-launch vehicles, and an expected political transition all influenced the de Klerk government ’s decision to close down a sophisticated space-launch-vehicle program .A ceremony to celebrate the dismantling of this sophisticated launch vehicle (which could easily have been modified to function as a multistage missile) was held only weeks after the Mandela government came to power in 1994. Since the 1994 elections, the South African government has been a disarmament trendsetter, leading the way in international negotiations to extend the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty indefinitely and create an African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone of unprecedented scope. Disarmament proponents hope that South Africa has established a map for rolling back weapons of mass destruction that other states will follow. It is logical that if states in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere experience similar changes and feel the kind of pressures that caused South Africa to disarm, they might emulate the same pattern. To date, the record has been mixed. Since the early 1990s, several countries have undertaken or made progress in covert weapons of mass destruction programs and research and development programs to develop missiles. However, a few countries have chosen the same path as South Africa by closing down secret nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons or space-launch-vehicle research programs. A large number of variables from different research perspectives and levels of analysis are also required to identify the conditions which led South Africa and a few other states to roll back their weapons programs. Our research suggests that several theoretical concepts and empirical insights derived from neorealist theory of international relations,2 organizational and bureaucratic politics research,3 comparative foreign policy, and political psychological perspectives are needed to fully explain why states develop weapons of mass destruction.4 For example, recent research using different methodologies confirms the importance of understanding how groups of political decision makers reach agreement about the nature of the problem that requires immediate action. Agreement within a small group about the nature of the problem, or the shared problem representation , is important because the options that will be taken by political decision makers are derived from the groups’ shared understanding of the problem. Throughout our study of political decision making by senior politicians in South Africa about covert weapons of mass destruction policies , we attempted to determine who were the critical political leaders, how they reached agreement on the nature of the immediate problem at hand, how they reached decisions about these problems, and how changes in the composition of the group members and changes in their environment influenced these shared problem representations over time.5 The South African case illustrates how the relative importance of different variables changes and interacts through different event sequences over time. Chapter 2 discusses some of the more important insights that emerge across cases where nation-states have pursued covert weapons of mass destruction programs. Chapters 3 through 7 describe and analyze the factors that explain the evolution of South Africa’s policies toward covert weapons of mass destruction programs and then their rollback. Chapter 8 describes important political trends in post-apartheid South...

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