South Africa was the first country to dismantle its nuclear weapons – weapons that the world did not know it had. Historian Dr Anna-Mart van Wyk has tracked her country's journey from international pariah to role model.
As the world expert on the political history of the South African apartheid regime's secret nuclear weapons program, Monash South Africa's Dr Anna-Mart van Wyk has become familiar with government and defence force archives in both South Africa and the US. The documents she has tirelessly tracked down and studied have cast new light on the politics behind the program, which remained hidden through the 1980s until it was voluntarily – but still secretly – dismantled in 1990. Confirmation that the program ever existed only came in 1993 when then-President F. W. de Klerk announced its abolition.
Dr van Wyk, a senior lecturer at Monash South Africa, has fought her own paper wars to get hitherto secret documents declassified. She has buttonholed scores of former politicians, from then-South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and has interviewed both the 'father' of the first South African atomic bomb, Dr Johan Slabber, and the South African naval-commodore-turned-Soviet-spy Dieter Gerhardt.
Above all, Dr van Wyk had to become a specialist in posing difficult questions: an unknown art in the tiny Afrikaans-speaking South African town of Carolina, where she was born in 1972 and where questioning of the apartheid regime simply did not happen.
Dr van Wyk says there was a visceral sense that something was not right, but you did not ask questions – at least not out loud. Through the 1980s, she watched the nightly TV footage of demonstrations in front of South African embassies in the US and the UK, "always followed by the rhetoric … 'We are a sovereign state; we will not tolerate international meddling in our affairs'."
Yet one feature of her home life presaged Dr van Wyk's future academic focus on the secrets of the apartheid regime. It was her interest in the snippets of information about the violation of arms embargoes that she gleaned from dinner table conversations between her father and his air force officer brother.
The curious teenager soon realised why her uncle had spent four years in France in the 1970s. He had been training in the maintenance of French Mirage fighter aircraft that were sold to South Africa in violation of a 1963 arms embargo.
By the 1980s, he was making regular extended stays in Israel, growing out his military haircut and sporting a beard and casual clothes.
"That intrigued me," Dr van Wyk recalls. "It turned out he was involved in developing a fighter aircraft, the Cheetah, based on the Israeli Kfir, despite a 1977 arms embargo against South Africa."
But that seed of interest lay dormant until 1993 when, after a varied academic path, she took a history module that would set her academic course for the next two decades.
It was also in 1993 that President de Klerk called a special sitting of the South African Parliament on 25 March to confirm the truth of rumours, first published in the New York Times in 1977, about the apartheid regime's nuclear arsenal. He said the regime had built six nuclear bombs and was halfway to a seventh. However, the A$300 million worth of bombs had been dismantled at Mr de Klerk's orders, before South Africa signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1991.
In South Africa, Dr van Wyk recalls, it was her father's generation that seemed to respond most to Mr de Klerk's revelation. "For some, it was a proud moment – 'Wow, we had the bomb'."
For Dr van Wyk and her fellow students it was "just another secret".
"It was difficult to digest everything that was coming out. By 1993, there was dialogue between the African National Congress [ANC] and the government. Every night on TV, new and often horrific things were being revealed."
In 1993 Mr de Klerk and Nelson Mandela shared the Nobel Peace Prize. On 27 April 1994, Mr Mandela was elected president in the country's first multiracial elections, with the ANC winning a majority in the National Assembly. By this time, Dr van Wyk's University of Pretoria history classes had become multiracial, and, in a class on liberation movements, she sat alongside a high-ranking member of the ANC Youth League.
In the years after 2000, Dr van Wyk's PhD research took her to the Jimmy Carter Library in Atlanta, the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the ARMSCOR Archive in Pretoria, where she read documents relating to South Africa's nuclear program. But the arms embargo against South Africa was her primary field of interest.
In 2006, as she began a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Johannesburg, she found herself fielding questions about nuclear South Africa and noticed that nobody seemed to be examining the link between the birth of its nuclear program and the Cold War.
The field of foreign collaboration with the apartheid regime was unexplored and she realised she had found a new research area.
She dug into US archives such as the George Bush Presidential Library in Texas, the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library in Michigan, and the National Security Archive in Washington, DC. She spent weeks at a time in the South African Foreign Affairs Archive, a treasure-trove of information about diplomatic wrangling between the US and South Africa. There she sat, her pulse racing, among file boxes with labels such as 'Nuclear power' and 'Top secret: nuclear power'.
Dr van Wyk also gained access to the Pretoria archive of the South African National Defence Force. Since 2011 her part-time research assistant has been one of its retired archivists – someone who knows exactly where to look.
"Sometimes the file label may just say 'France'. It may just be an exchange of military attachés. Or something useful. And it costs 15 rand (about A$1.80) an hour to get documents declassified."
Dr van Wyk's first publications focused on the Cold War link to the nuclear program. The watershed year, she discovered, was 1974, when the left-wing military coup in Portugal led Pretoria to anticipate the overthrow of the colonial governments in Angola and Mozambique and the influx of a communist presence in Southern Africa. Cuban forces were fighting in Angola, assisted by the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). The South African government believed that a Soviet-orchestrated assault in Southern Africa was inevitable, and that South Africa could not depend on outside assistance. The regime saw the bomb as a deterrent to be revealed in case of imminent or immediate threat.
Since 2010, Dr van Wyk and Monash South Africa have been research partners in the Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP), a joint venture of the Florence-based Machiavelli Center for Cold War Studies and the History and Public Policy Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC. Involving partner scholars from 10 countries that either have or have had nuclear weapons, it seeks to create an international history of nuclear proliferation.
"One of the aims is to get as many documents as possible declassified, so the world can have access to them," says Dr van Wyk, whose NPIHP work is funded by a Carnegie Foundation grant and Monash South Africa.
At the same time, she continues to search for documents that will show the exact role played by other nations – in particular Israel and France – in South Africa's nuclear build-up.
"There is general suspicion that Israel offered nuclear weapons. But we need more documents," she says. "That's the thing about archival research. You find a document, see something suggested and then need to find other documents that provide evidence."
The question also remains as to who was responsible for the 1979 'Vela incident' when the US Vela satellite picked up a one-second burst of light near South Africa's Prince Edward Island, supposedly evidence of a secret nuclear test.
Was the test Israeli or South African? An Israeli one with South African assistance? Or vice versa? According to Dr van Wyk, the person who may have the answer is the former South African naval commodore and convicted Soviet spy Mr Gerhardt, who was head of the Simonstown naval base, near Cape Town, before the incident, and whom she interviewed last year. But he is not saying.
"Until he was arrested in 1982, he leaked many secret documents to the Soviets. When, in 1977, Soviet surveillance satellites 'discovered' a nuclear test site in the Kalahari Desert, it was not by chance. [The Soviets subsequently informed the US, which pressured South Africa to abandon the site.] There also are indications that Israeli ships were docked at Simonstown just before the Vela incident."
South Africa's nuclear history, highlighted by it being the only nation ever to dismantle its own program, means that Dr van Wyk's research has unique implications for today's global campaign for nuclear disarmament.
Former Australian Foreign Minister Professor Gareth Evans AC, co-chair of the International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament, agrees that, back in 1993, the significance of Mr de Klerk's revelations was lost in the general international excitement about the historic changes then engulfing South Africa.
But along with other high-profile advocates of the elimination of nuclear weapons, Professor Evans has regularly cited South Africa as an example of what other states can do. In Eliminating Nuclear Threats: A Practical Agenda for Global Policymakers (February 2010), co-written with commission co-chair Yoriko Kawaguchi, Professor Evans also referred to South Africa when making the point that "nuclear arsenals no longer occupy pride of place in the security policies of the major powers".
For Dr van Wyk, the apartheid regime's own view of its arsenal was that the regime's security was actually diminished rather than enhanced by its possession of nuclear weapons – an instructive lesson for modern rogue states with nuclear capability.
"One of the lessons of the South African experience is: 'What do you actually want to do with them?' In South Africa the weapons were developed to be a deterrent. Then Namibia became independent, the Cubans withdrew from Angola and de Klerk began the process of reconciliation. The 'Red danger' disappeared and the weapons became superfluous.
"I think the message from South Africa is that the world, clearly, can function without nuclear weapons."
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), a specialised agency within the United Nations system in Vienna, houses a miniature ploughshare, which was made from a melted metal casing of one of South Africa's nuclear weapons. It was given to the IAEA by former South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha after the bombs were dismantled. The ploughshare is a reference to the biblical principle of 'turning your weapons into ploughshares', in other words, 'make peace, not war'. It is symbolic of South Africa's transition from a nuclear weapons state to a non-nuclear weapons state – the first in the world to make this transition.
