First we got the bomb and that was good
'Cause we love peace and motherhood
Then Russia got the bomb but that’s o.k.
'Cause the balance of power is maintained that way
Following the M.A.D. reasoning of nuclear deterrence, the U.K. and France were certainly in much closer range of Soviet nukes than the U.S. was, so one can see that they would want the bomb themselves.
China and The U.S.S.R. were never the best of buddies, so having a Soviet nuclear neighbor couldn’t have been appealing.
India and China have not always played nicely together, so India wants the bomb too. And if India’s going to have the bomb, damn it, Pakistan wants one too.
<paragraph deleted at Israel’s request>
So, who was South Africa’s bomb meant to impress? In the Tom Lehrer song quoted at the opening of the OP, he suggests that South Africa wants two bombs- one for the black and one for the white. I kinda suspect that this wasn’t the real reasoning though.
Why a Nuclear Armed South Africa?
. . . and the edit feature does not allow me access to the Thread Title to fix the typo. Mods?
Thanks for the link. From that linked article there is a link to a 6 page article as a PDF. That article looks like it might be very interesting, I’ll have to look at it when I have time to read it through.
From the first link (grude’s link) seems hostilities with Namibia may have been a factor. I’ll have to read up on that as well.
Even if the South African government didn’t have a particular target in mind, it was a way to say “Don’t fuck with us,” in defense of white minority rule and Apartheid.
South Africa had the ability to defend itself from any conventional military attack. I believe what the South African government was afraid of was that other African countries would encourage an uprising among South Africa’s black citizens against the white minority which controlled the government. So South Africa’s nuclear weapons served as a sort of last resort to remind those other countries that if they tried to overthrow the white regime, the white regime had the ability to retaliate.
But if you have cranky neighbors that don’t have nukes and you do, they are still to your advantage even IF you can defend yourself with conventional forces. A little border skirmish? Keep it conventional. A big ass war with lots of your own guys dying? A few lobbed nukes (or the threat to do so) might help things along to your advantage.
In the 1970’s the USSR was paying cuban mercenary troops to foment civil war in Angola and Mozambique. The SA Army did fight batteles with these troops, and there was a fear that SA would eventually face defeat. So the decision was made to develop nukes.
This was a factor in the Cubans decision to withdraw from these wars.
Your time line is wrong. South Africa expressed an interest in developing nuclear weapons before Angola and Mozambique gained their independence from Portugal.
You’re looking at the whole thing in a rather naive way. Every nation, US included, developed nukes for the same reason: To protect their country’s self-interests on the world stage…
But it’s a pretty expensive program even for a moderately well-off country like South Africa. The majority of countries in the world don’t have nuclear weapons. So the question is why did South Africa decide its self-interests needed nuclear weapons?
South Africa was ruled by a white minority and they had legally codified brutal racial oppression of the black majority, they were surrounded by other countries with black majority populations. Apartheid was so gross and distasteful they had to have seen the writing on the wall basically, it has dissapeared from the public’s memory but at the time there were protests by celebrities and musicians against it.
I think they believed revolution, whether home grown or supported by other nations, was inevitable. They wanted a threat to stop this, to allow them to hold on to power by their fingernails.
And realize this went way, way beyond Jim Crow or anything else(non-whites lost voting rights, citizenship) they knew it was going to come crashing down eventually.
If this was there idea, it was a bad one. South Africa’s neighbors were, by and large, encouraging rebellion, providing them with safe havens across the border, providing weapons, and who knows what else. It would be totally indefensible to use nukes against what were basically gun runners. The South African people overthrew their own government, but they surely had lots of help.
As I understand it, they dismantled their nuke programs rather than either use it against internal revolution (practically impossible to do anyway) and out of some weird paranoid fear of blacks going crazy with the nukes if the revolution ultimately succeeded.
In answer to the OP’s direct question – paranoid countries get nukes. But even paranoids have genuine enemies, sometimes.
If the leadership of South Africa at the time was rational explain apartheid, they were not. As pressure mounted internally and externally rather then slowly and orderly end it they only got crazier, stepping up oppression and mass murder and torture and outlawing political parties on and on. The nukes were a final threat to the populace that they might wrest power from them, but would it be worth it if they were able to nuke major cities before being taken down?
Even the wiki article mentions the leadership saw themselves as a beseiged bastion surrounded by black extremists and communists, these people were not thinking rationally.