What can be learned from South Africa, the first and only case where a nuclear arsenal has been developed and dismantled? In his recently published article in The New Internationalist Robin Möser lays out how „the racially segregated nation came to build nuclear bombs in the first place, and what can be learned from its unprecedented step of giving them up“ (2025, p. 38).

In September 1989 and the following two years, newly elected President FW de Klerk introduced several political reforms, one of which was to resolve the „government’s ambiguity about the status of its nuclear capabilities“, to dismantling the nuclear devices and to join the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) by 1991. IAEA’s verification mission started shortly after.

South Africa’s case shows that, apart from moral conviction, domestic political preconditions, paired with a conducively perceived international context, are required for abandoning nuclear weapons: „[C]ontinuing to possess nuclear weapons under the radar would have undermined the new South Africa’s international legitimacy and barred it from legally joining the NPT“ (Möser 2025, p. 39). A second key lesson addresses that non-proliferation in a country sanctioned for various issues can hardly be achieved by reassuring relief of sanctions.

The outlined efforts can be considered a contribution to the global identity of South Africa, moving „from isolation to influence, helping secure the indefinite extension of the NPT in 1995, and emerging as a persuasive moral voice on disarmament. The country used its ‘disarmament dividend’ to bridge divides between nuclear and non-nuclear states“ (Möser 2025, p. 40).

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