Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel hosts an honour cordon to welcome China's Minister of National Defence Gen. Chang Wanquan to the Pentagon Aug. 19, 2013. Credit: DoD Photo by Glenn Fawcett

By George Gao
NEW YORK, Aug 21 2013 (IPS)

U.S. Secretary of Defence Chuck Hagel welcomed Chinese Defence Minister Chang Wanquan to the Pentagon Monday as part of Chang’s four-day tour of U.S. defence compounds.

“We just finished a very productive meeting, where I restated that the United States is committed to building a positive and constructive relationship with China,” Hagel told reporters.

Hagel and Chang spoke of their countries’ commitment to build a stronger military-to-military relationship. They highlighted new ways to cooperate, such as in humanitarian aid and disaster relief operations, counter-piracy and counterterrorism initiatives, joint military exercises, and military exchange programmes.

Asked about the U.S. “rebalance” or “pivot”, which involves increased U.S. military presence in the Asia-Pacific, Chang quoted his president, Xi Jinping: “The Pacific is wide enough to accommodate the two great countries, China and the United States. It’s always the Chinese position to welcome the U.S. to play a constructive role in the Asia-Pacific.”

Chang said that while the U.S. rebalancing strategy is a comprehensive one, he hopes it will not target China or stand against China’s affairs in the region.

Tensions flare in Asia-Pacific

Meanwhile, China is embroiled in territorial disputes with U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific, namely the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea, and Japan in the East China Sea.

Hagel said that while the U.S. takes no official position on sovereignty on these matters, the U.S. does have an interest for such disputes to be resolved “peacefully, without coercion”.

Hagel is slated to visit the Philippines at the end of August. As part of its rebalance, the U.S. is negotiating an agreement with Manila to allow U.S. troops greater access to Philippine military bases. Obtaining such access builds on former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld’s “lily pad” strategy, which involves lightweight U.S. forces stationed in bases spangled across the globe.

“China sees the U.S. as exploiting the opportunity created by the anxieties in the region to enhance its military presence and access arrangements,” said Bonnie Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia in the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“The prospects of a U.S.-Philippines agreement on access arrangements has been discussed for some time, so the Chinese aren’t taken by surprise, though they are likely concerned about it,” Glaser told IPS.

China sees the U.S. rebalance as a strategy to counter China’s increasing global influence. In general, China’s rise in status has dotted media headlines in 2013: most recently, China passed the U.S. as the world’s largest trading nation. It is also set to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy by 2016, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Analysts have already noted evidence of a new conventional arms race between the two nations. The U.S. and China have the world’s highest defence budgets, running up to 682 and 166 billion U.S. dollars in 2012, respectively, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

China has invested in a range of anti-ship, land attack, and ballistic missiles, as well as counter-space weapons and military cyberspace “capabilities”, according to a 2013 U.S. Department of Defence (DOD) report.

Such actions are part of China’s anti-access and area denial, or “A2/AD”, missions. The U.S. is worried that China’s A2/AD weapons will restrict U.S. “freedom of action”, by limiting U.S. access to future “theatres of conflict”, as well as U.S. movements within that theatre.

To get around A2/AD, the U.S. unveiled a new war tactic known as AirSea Battle, which evolved from the AirLand Battle concept developed in the Cold War to counter any “Soviet-backed combined arms attack in Europe”. AirSea Battle’s aim “is to develop networked, integrated forces capable of attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy and defeat adversary forces”, according to the DOD.

“Conventional arms competition between the U.S. and China is primarily over U.S. military access to the region,” said Glaser.

“China is developing (A2/AD) capabilities that seek to deny the U.S. such access in a crisis, and the U.S. is determined to sustain access and operational manoeuvrability,” she said.

One military niche that China has not rapidly developed is its nuclear arsenal, which contains a modest 250 nuclear warheads, compared to Russia’s 8,500 and the U.S.’ 7,700, according to SIPRI estimates.

While China is expected to streamline and modernise its nuclear force, specifically for second-strike or retaliatory purposes if another country instigates the first strike, analysts don’t see the arms race extending into the nuclear realm.

“Right now, I don’t see a high probability of China dramatically increasing the size of its nuclear forces,” said Elbridge Colby, co-chair of a working group that penned the report “Nuclear Weapons and U.S.-China Relations” published by CSIS.

“(China) does not appear to want to engage in a nuclear arms race with the U.S., both because that would likely spur countervailing responses by the U.S. and other countries in the region, and because it views too much expenditure on nuclear arms as wasteful,” Colby told IPS.

Asked how China is responding to AirSea Battle, John Chan, a China analyst at the World Socialist Web Site, told IPS that China is expanding its A2/AD capacities, as well as other military capabilities, including anti-surveillance, “in the hope that Beijing can seriously undermine the U.S. military in the event of war”.  Chan has long argued that the U.S. rebalance has ratcheted tensions in the Asia-Pacific.

Chan also interpreted an Aug. 2 piece by Chinese security expert Shen Dingli published in Chinese by Huan Qiu as something that calls into question China’s longstanding “no first use” nuclear policy. China is currently the only one of five U.N. Security Council permanent members with a “no first use” policy – which restricts China’s use of nuclear weapons only for deterrence and retaliation after suffering a nuclear strike.

However, asked via email if the U.S. rebalance to the Asia-Pacific should or will lead China to re-examine its “no first-use” policy, Shen, the vice dean of the Institute of International Affairs at Fudan University, told IPS: “Not clear, probably not.”

Asked for ways to prevent the U.S. and China from entering into a classic security dilemma and arms race, Shen said: “If the U.S. would cease to do its pivoting; if the U.S. would cease to build up its missile defence; if the U.S. would cease its space military programme, and if China would follow suit.”

A nuclear-armed Iran would not pose a fundamental threat to the United States and its regional allies like Israel and the Gulf Arab monarchies, according to a new report released here Friday by the Rand Corporation.

Entitled “Iran After the Bomb: How Would a Nuclear-Armed Tehran Behave?“, the report asserts that the acquisition by Tehran of nuclear weapons  would above all be intended to deter an attack by hostile powers, presumably including Israel and the United States, rather than for aggressive purposes."An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power." -- Alireza Nader of the Rand Corporation

And while its acquisition may indeed lead to greater tension between Iran and its Sunni-led neighbours, the 50-page report concludes that Tehran would be unlikely to use nuclear weapons against other Muslim countries. Nor would it be able to halt its diminishing influence in the region resulting from the Arab Spring and its support for the Syrian government, according to the author, Alireza Nader.

“Iran’s development of nuclear weapons will enhance its ability to deter an external attack, but it will not enable it to change the Middle East’s geopolitical order in its own favour,” Nader, an international policy analyst at RAND, told IPS. “The Islamic Republic’s challenge to the region is constrained by its declining popularity, a weak economy, and a limited conventional military capability. An Iran with nukes will still be a declining power.”

The report reaches several conclusions all of which generally portray Iran as a rational actor in its international relations.

While Nader calls it a “revisionist state” that tries to undermine what it sees as a U.S.-dominated order in the Middle East, his report stresses that “it does not have territorial ambitions and does not seek to invade, conquer, or occupy other nations.”

Further, the report identifies the Islamic Republic’s military doctrine as defensive in nature.  This posture is presumably a result of the volatile and unstable region in which it exists and is exacerbated by its status as a Shi’a and Persian-majority nation in a Sunni and Arab-majority region.

Iran is also scarred by its traumatic eight-year war with Iraq in which as many as one million Iranians lost their lives.

The new report comes amidst a growing controversy here over whether a nuclear-armed Iran could itself be successfully “contained” by the U.S. and its allies and deterred both from pursuing a more aggressive policy in the region and actually using nuclear weapons against its foes.

Iran itself has vehemently denied it intends to build a weapon, and the U.S. intelligence community has reported consistently over the last six years that Tehran’s leadership has not yet decided to do so, although the increasing sophistication and infrastructure of its nuclear programme will make it possible to build one more quickly if such a decision is made.

Official U.S. policy, as enunciated repeatedly by top officials, including President Barack Obama, is to “prevent” Iran from obtaining a weapon, even by military means if ongoing diplomatic efforts and “crippling” economic sanctions fail to persuade Iran to substantially curb its nuclear programme.

A nuclear-armed Iran, in the administration’s view – which is held even more fervently by the U.S. Congress where the Israel lobby exerts its greatest influence – represents an “existential threat” to the Jewish state.

In addition, according to the administration, Iran’s acquisition of a weapon would likely embolden it and its allies – notably Lebanon’s Hezbollah – to pursue more aggressive actions against their foes and could well set off a regional “cascade effect” in which other powers, particulary Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt, would feel obliged to launch nuclear-weapons programmes of their own.

But a growing number of critics of the prevention strategy – particularly that part of it that would resort to military action against Iran – argue that a nuclear Iran will not be nearly as dangerous as the reigning orthodoxy assumes.

A year ago, for example, Paul Pillar, a veteran CIA analyst who served as National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia from 2000 to 2005, published a lengthy essay in ‘The Washington Monthly’, “We Can Live With a Nuclear Iran: Fears of a Bomb in Tehran’s Hands Are Overhyped, and a War to Prevent It Would Be a Disaster.”

More recently, Colin Kahl, an analyst at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) who also served as the Pentagon’s top Middle East policy adviser for much of Obama’s first term, published two reports – the first questioning the “cascade effect” in the region, and the second, published earlier this week and entitled “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran,” outlining a detailed “containment strategy” — including extending Washington’s nuclear umbrella over states that feel threatened by a nuclear Iran — the U.S. could follow to deter Tehran’s use of a nuclear bomb or its transfer to non-state actors, like Hezbollah, and persuade regional states not to develop their own nuclear arms capabilities.

In addition, Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst at the Brookings Institution whose 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm” helped persuade many liberals and Democrats to support the U.S. invasion of Iraq, will publish a new book, “Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American Strategy”, that is also expected to argue for a containment strategy if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon.

Because both Brookings and CNAS are regarded as close to the administration, some neo-conservative commentators have expressed alarm that these reports are “trial balloons” designed to set the stage for Obama’s abandonment of the prevention strategy in favour of containment, albeit by another name.

It is likely that Nader’s study – coming as it does from RAND, a think tank with historically close ties to the Pentagon – will be seen in a similar light.

His report concedes that Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons would lead to greater tension with the Gulf Arab monarchies and thus to greater instability in the region. Moreover, an inadvertent or accidental nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran would be a “dangerous possibility”, according to Nader who also notes that the “cascade effect”, while outside the scope of his study, warrants “careful consideration”.

Despite Iran’s strong ideological antipathy toward Israel, the report does not argue that Tehran would attack the Jewish state with nuclear weapons, as that would almost certainly lead to the regime’s destruction.

Israel, in Nader’s view, fears that Iran’s nuclear capability could serve as an “umbrella” for Tehran’s allies that could significantly hamper Israel’s military operations in the Palestinian territories, the Levant, and the wider region.

But the report concludes that Tehran is unlikely to extend its nuclear deterrent to its allies, including Hezbollah, noting that the interests of those groups do not always – or even often – co-incide with Iran’s.  Iran would also be highly unlikely to transfer nuclear weapons to them in any event, according to the report.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

In the late 19^th century, Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously touted one golden rule for dramatic productions: if you show your audience a loaded gun in the first act, that gun must go off by the last.

The first launch of a Trident missile on Jan. 18, 1977 at Cape Canaveral, Florida. Credit: U.S. Air Force

But Chekhov’s storytelling trope is troubling if applied to the world’s weapons technology today, which include an estimated 17,300 nukes – used primarily by nations as props to leverage international power.

According to the Ploughshares Fund’s World Nuclear Stockpile Report, an estimated 8,500 nukes belong to Russia and 7,700 to the U.S. The seven other nations with a nuclear arsenal trail far behind: they include France (300), China (240), the U.K. (225), Pakistan (90-110), India (60-110), Israel (60-80) and most recently North Korea (<10).

“It’s hard to imagine any military mission that will require the use of one nuclear weapon. The use of 10 weapons would be a catastrophe beyond human experience, and 50 is unthinkable,” said Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation based in the U.S.

“The number you need to actually deter an enemy from attacking the U.S. with or without nuclear weapons is very, very low. To be on the safe side, you might want a couple of hundred,” he told IPS.

“The idea that we need thousands of nuclear weapons… is an outmoded, irrational, expensive legacy of the Cold War,” he said.

While the U.S.’s nuke budget is secret, Cirincione estimates that in the next decade, the U.S. will spend 640 billion dollars on nukes and its related programmes – such as missile defence systems, environmental clean-up of nuclear activity and the technological upgrade of the current nuclear arsenal.

Asked about the U.S.’s role in pushing for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation on the international scale, Cirincione said, “The U.S. is probably the most influential voice in this debate, but it can’t do it alone. Most importantly, it needs Russia to reduce the arsenals with them.”

On Feb. 5, 2011, the U.S. and Russia entered into force a New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), in which both nations agreed by 2018 to limit the number of their warheads to 1,550; and the number of their combined intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and heavy bombers equipped for nuclear armaments to 800.

“If the U.S. and Russia can agree to cut their arsenals in half, for example, as they did in the 1980s and the 1990s… it would be universally applauded, and it would be very difficult for bureaucracies and political opponents to resist that in either country,” said Cirincione.

But U.S. progress for disarmament and non-proliferation has stalled in the past few years. George Perkovich, director of the Nuclear Policy Programme at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, attributes the U.S.’s balk partly to internal politics in Washington.

In his April 2013 monograph, Do Unto Others: Toward a Defensible Nuclear Doctrine, Perkovich writes, “A relatively small, specialized community of experts and officials shapes U.S. nuclear policy.”

Members of this community often distort nuclear threats to the U.S., as well as the best ways to respond to such threats, argues Perkovich. They do this not in the U.S.’s national security interest, but in their own career interests to prevent “their domestic rivals from attacking them as too weak to hold office”.

Nukes deter U.S.-led regime change

Perkovich also notes in his monograph that Iran, North Korea and Pakistan believe having their own nuclear arsenals deter U.S.-led regime change. They fear the fates of nuclear-free Iraq in 2003 and Libya in 2011.

Asked how the U.S. should respond if future world governments – oppressive or not, who are acting against U.S. interests – continue pursuing nukes to prevent regime change, Perkovich told IPS that would be a difficult problem.

“The one and only thing nuclear weapons are good for is to keep people from invading your country. So, states and leaders that worry about getting invaded tend to find nukes attractive, or alliance with the U.S. attractive,” he said.

“Non-proliferation would be easier to achieve if states didn’t worry they were going to be invaded and/ or overthrown if they didn’t have nuclear weapons.

“The problem, clearly, is that some governments are so brutal and menacing to their own people and neighbours that it is hard to foreswear trying to remove them,” he added.

Perkovich recommended that the U.S. limit pressure against repressive governments to political and moral means, as well as to sanctions; and that the U.S. clarify it won’t act militarily, if the repressive regime does not attack its neighbours or seek nukes.

Cirincione, author of Bomb Scare: The History and Future of Nuclear Weapons, argued that vying for nukes, in Iran and North Korea’s cases, may actually be counterproductive.

“I don’t think it improves their security, I think it isolates them even further,” he said. “It prevents them from forging the kind of international ties that can really aid their country, build their economies (and) increase their influence.

“That means that in order to stop those countries from getting or keeping nuclear weapons, you have to address their legitimate security concerns. A part of the engagement with those countries has got to be security assurances that guarantees then that you won’t attack them, or that their neighbours won’t attack them.”

Obama’s nuclear legacy

During his December 2012 speech at the National War College in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama said, “Missile by missile, warhead by warhead, shell by shell, we’re putting a bygone era behind us.”

Cirincione explained that pursuing nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation has been important to Obama since his youth. Obama’s first foreign policy speech as president – in Prague in April 2009 – and his first foreign policy speech after re-election both focused on nukes.

“The president faces a multitude of pressing issues, but only two of them threaten destruction on a planetary scale: global warming and nuclear weapons,” said Cirincione.

While opposition to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation is prevalent inside Washington, it pales in comparison to opposition facing warming, immigration, or tax reform.

“This is an opportunity for the president to make a major improvement in U.S. and global security with a relatively small investment of his time,” said Cirincione, who explained that Obama’s efforts to curb nukes may conclude a historic arc, which started with President John F. Kennedy’s efforts in the 1960s and was accelerated by President Ronald Reagan’s efforts in the 1980s.

Cirincione said, “(Obama’s) got three and a half years to do it. If he starts now, he can get the job done. He can change U.S. nuclear policy to put it irreversibly on a path to fewer nuclear weapons, and eventually (eliminate) this threat from the face of the earth.”

Tuesday’s nuclear test by North Korea poses major new questions about the sustainability of President Barack Obama’s first-term policy of “strategic patience” in dealing with Pyongyang.

Both hawks and doves have jumped on the underground test, which appears to have had a greater explosive force than the North’s two previous tests in 2006 and 2009, respectively, as grounds for substantially changing Washington’s approach.

“The nuclear explosion proves that American policy has been a failure and that a new path is needed,” said Michael Auslin of the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI), who called for much more aggressive efforts to prevent Pyongyang from exporting weapons of mass destruction (WMD) or missile technology and punishing China if fails to cooperate.“If North Korea keeps testing like this, it will start a debate in South Korea and Japan about whether they should build their own nuclear weapons,” said Cirincione.

Washington, he said, should be “declaring that containment is our new policy and threatening overwhelming retaliation to kill the Kim (Jong-un) regime should North Korea use any of its WMD on us or our allies.”

“I think the policy of strategic patience – of not talking to them – has failed,” agreed Joe Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, a prominent nuclear-disarmament group. “For most of the last 12 years, during which North Korea held four long-range missile tests and three nuclear tests, we haven’t talked to them. When we’ve talked to them, they haven’t tested.

“There should be another round of sanctions and more pressure, but don’t expect that that’s going to work,” he told IPS. “After a decent interval, the U.S. should reach out to North Korea and engage in direct talks. We’ve got to provide them an off-ramp, or else they’re just going to keep doing this.”

In the wake of Tuesday’s test, which provoked stern protests from the major powers, including China, North Korea’s closest ally, Obama, who was expected to announce new plans to unilaterally reduce Washington’s nuclear arsenal at his annual State of the Union Address Tuesday night, denounced Pyongyang’s action as “highly provocative” and called for “swift and credible action by the international community” to punish it.

After condemning the test as a “clear threat to international peace and security,” the U.N. Security Council was meeting Tuesday afternoon to begin working out specific measures to be taken against Pyongyang.

“These provocations do not make North Korea more secure,” said Obama, who later spoke with outgoing South Korean President Lee Myung-bak to reaffirm Washington’s defence commitment.

“Far from achieving its stated goal of becoming a strong and prosperous nation, North Korea has instead increasingly isolated and impoverished its people through its ill-advised pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and their means of delivery.”

Since taking office, Obama has pursued a policy of “strategic patience”, a policy that has conditioned any substantial move toward normalisation of bilateral relations on concrete steps by Pyongyang to suspend and eventually abandon its nuclear-weapons programme.

Last February, the administration thought it had achieved a breakthrough when Pyongyang agreed to suspend its long-range missile tests in exchange for 240,000 tonnes of U.S. food aid.

But just a few weeks later, the North announced plans to launch a satellite into space using a multi-stage rocket. Although Washington warned that such a launch would be considered a violation of the accord, the regime went ahead with the launch – by all accounts a failure – anyway, effectively shelving hopes for further progress.

Last December, Pyongyang launched another multi-stage rocket that successfully put an 80-kg satellite into orbit, an achievement that provoked greater concern here because it demonstrated a much greater advance in mastering inter-continental ballistic missile technology than had been anticipated.

The action drew strong condemnation and additional sanctions by the U.N. Security Council, including China.

Since North Korea suggested last month that it was preparing a nuclear test as well, both the U.S. and China, as well as the other members of the Six-Party Talks (Japan, South Korea, and Russia) warned that it would result in additional sanctions.

But Pyongyang rejected those warnings, vowing instead to “boost and strengthen our defensive military power including nuclear deterrence.”

Washington and its allies have so thoroughly sanctioned North Korea for its “bad behaviour” that it has very few ways to punish it short of war. Indeed, the only serious source of external pressure on Pyongyang at this point is China, which provides it with fuel and other vital assistance.

But while North Korea’s continuing defiance of China’s appeals not to test and to instead return to the Six-Party Talks has clearly taxed Beijing patience, Beijing remains more worried that cutting off its support could result in the regime’s collapse.

“China is in a very difficult position at this point,” noted Alan Romberg, a Northeast Asia specialist at the Stimson Center. “On the one hand, its long-standing strategic calculation remains unchanged: they don’t want to see Korea re-unified under the leadership of Seoul closely allied to the United States. I don’t think anything has changed about that.

“On the other hand, the way China handled this before the test and after it has been noteworthy. They have been very outspoken in opposition. They even announced publicly that they had called in the North Korean ambassador (to receive a protest),” he noted. “You have a new leadership in China, and it seems there’s a level of impatience that wasn’t as obvious as before.”

That impatience may not only have to do with Pyongyang’s defiance of its wishes, but also growing concerns in Beijing that if North Korea continues on its current path, it risked destabilising the region, as well as itself.

“If North Korea keeps testing like this, it will start a debate in South Korea and Japan about whether they should build their own nuclear weapons,” noted Cirincione. “If we see a regular series of tests, the pressures in those countries will build.”

Indeed, Donald Gregg, a former ambassador to Seoul, noted Tuesday that, despite Pyongyang’s insistence that its nuclear programme is designed to deter, rather than threaten, it has already “prompted Japan to consider developing its own nuclear programme, which highlights the need for dialogue”.

For now, analysts here and in the region are particularly focused on discovering more about Tuesday’s test, particularly whether it involved a miniaturised nuclear device that could fit in a missile warhead or on a bomber aircraft and whether the device itself used plutonium, which it used in its two previous tests, or enriched uranium, which would be unprecedented.

“If we find out it’s a uranium bomb, that means they have a whole new stream of material that can be used to build nuclear weapons, and they might export this bomb design to Iran,” according to Cirincione, who noted the two countries have cooperated on missile technology in the past.

*Jim Lobe’s blog on U.S. foreign policy can be read at http://www.lobelog.com.

Smoke billowing out from a nuclear testing facility. Credit: National Nuclear Security Administration/CC-BY-ND-2.0

By John Fraser
JOHANNESBURG, Jan 8 2013 (IPS)

Not many nice things can be said about the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was racist, violent in the brutal oppression of many of its own citizens, and was despised around the world.

However, in the dying days of apartheid, the South African authorities took a step that has had major implications for the country and for the African continent: it scrapped its nuclear weapons programme.

“The first stage involved the dismantling of South Africa’s six complete (and one partially assembled) nuclear devices,” reported Greg Mills, who heads the Johannesburg-based Brenthurst Foundation, a research body that acts as an advisor to African governments.

“A decision to this effect was taken by then President F.W. de Klerk in February 1990, shortly after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and the unbanning of the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress and the South African Communist Party.”

South Africa acceded to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on Jul. 10, 1991.  Seven weeks later, on Sep. 16, the country signed a Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowing for frequent IAEA inspections of its facilities.

“South African authorities co-operated fully with the IAEA during the whole verification process, and were commended by the then director-general of the Agency in 1992, Dr. Hans Blix, for providing inspectors with unlimited access and data beyond those required by the Safeguards Agreement,” added Mills.

“The second step involved the scrapping of South Africa’s ballistic missile programme, which commenced in 1992, and took around 18 months.

“This process culminated in its admission to the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) in September 1995, after the destruction of the last of its missile engines had been verified.

“The third stage involved the conclusion of SA’s biological and chemical warfare programme.”

Mills concluded that South Africa “thus occupies a unique position in the world as being the first country to have voluntarily dismantled its nuclear weapons capability.

“The (South African) experience does point to the importance of creating the right environment in which regimes can be made to feel confident enough to disarm and stay that way.”

While South African apartheid leaders’ actions were certainly worthy of praise – for once – there is some suspicion surrounding their motives.

Did they dismantle the country’s nuclear weapons because they believed in a vision of an Africa free of nuclear weapons?

Or was their motive more cynical? Realising that black rule was inevitable, did they dismantle South Africa’s nuclear weapons to keep them out of the hands of Nelson Mandela and his looming ANC administration?

Mills’ colleague Terence McNamee, deputy-director of the Brenthurst Foundation, wrote in the Johannesburg Star newspaper that the country that dismantled nuclear weapons “was not (current President Jacob) Zuma’s South Africa, but another country, an international pariah, mercifully now extinct.

“Zuma doubtless believes, like most of his senior colleagues who were active during the transition to democracy, that the people who built South Africa’s nuclear arsenal – the apartheid regime – destroyed it because they didn’t want the ANC to get their hands on it.”

He noted that de Klerk waited until March 1993 to tell the world of the dismantlement of South Africa’s nuclear weapons, and until that time “no one, not even Nelson Mandela, had been informed that the programme had been abolished (let alone that it even existed).”

While nuclear weapons no longer have a place in South Africa, or on the African continent, there is a growing expectation that nuclear energy will be required to help provide a growing part of the energy mix on the Continent.

“Nuclear power could help to answer the extraordinary energy backlog of African countries, where the continent produces about the levels of Spain, though with 20 times as many people,” Mills told IPS.

“But the concerns about the use of nuclear power in Africa go to the heart of the very reason why there is this backlog in the first instance: governance.”

Branding expert Jeremy Sampson believes the South African government received rewards for its decision to dismantle its nuclear arsenal. Credit: John Fraser/IPS

Branding expert Jeremy Sampson, executive chairman of the Johannesburg-based branding consultancy Interbrand Sampson, notes that in image terms the South African decision to scrap its nuclear weapons programme has boosted its moral authority on the issue of non-proliferation.

“The last couple of decades have seen a dramatic rise in the importance of brand and reputational issues,” he told IPS.

“This no longer applies simply to companies, products and services, but today embraces people, even countries.”

Questioning the real reason for scrapping South Africa’s nuclear weapons programme, Sampson speculates that the regime may have received rewards for this decision, which have not yet come to light.

“Did South Africa really develop a nuclear device, who helped them, was there a dummy run in the deep South Atlantic, and how would they have used it?” he wonders.

Sampson also suggests that South Africa’s decision to voluntarily given up its nuclear option raises many questions.

“Was the apartheid regime really desperate? Were sanctions biting? What was bartered, what guarantees were given, were slush funds really set up around the world for escaping members of the regime, as happened in Germany at the end of the Second World War?

“Has any other country voluntarily given up its nuclear option, which would have taken years and billions to develop?”

Sampson argues that whatever the rewards, they must have been “very, very significant. Military activity in Angola and the propping up of (Angolan rebel leader) Jonas Savimbi must have been high on the agenda.”

Frans Cronje, deputy CEO of the South African Institute of Race Relations, another Johannesburg-based think tank, suggests that the apartheid regime came under strong pressure from the West, and possibly from Russia as well, to renounce its nuclear weapons programme.

“The whole thing was dressed up as an honourable retreat from a nuclear Africa,” he told IPS.

“It is likely that Western countries and Russia as well had concerns about an independent African state having nuclear weapons.”

He also believes South Africa would today be stronger on the international stage if it had retained a nuclear arsenal.

“A nuclear African state would be taken more seriously and would have a stronger leadership role – it forces people to take you seriously,” he said.

“In leadership terms, renouncing nuclear weapons does the opposite – it reduces your influence in foreign affairs and international politics.

“If renouncing nuclear weapons grows your influence, others would be falling over themselves to surrender their nuclear arsenals.”

We may never know all the reasons why, but South Africa’s scrapping of its nuclear weapons did win moral benefits that have endured today.

It gave the country a voice globally on non-proliferation issues and the moral authority to develop its own nuclear electricity industry without attracting international suspicion, as has most recently been the case with Iran.

(END)