Abstract
Since August 1977, when the USSR first alerted the US to what appeared to be a nuclear test site under construction in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa has played a subtle but risky game of nuclear diplomacy with the West. The game has not been without cost for South Africa. Yet, unlike most aspects of Pretoria’s relations with the West, its nuclear strategy has been active rather than reactive, and to a large degree successful.
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Notes and References
Ronald Walters, ‘Uranium Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy in Southern Africa’, Journal of Southern African Affairs, July 1979, p. 94.
Richard Betts, ‘A Diplomatic Bomb for South Africa?’, International Security, 4, 4 (1979), p. 96.
See Betts, ‘A Diplomatic Bomb?’, pp. 105–8; Robert S. Jaster, ‘Politics and the “Afrikaner Bomb”’, Orbis, No. 4, Winter 1984;
Ronald W. Walters, ‘U.S. Policy and Nuclear Proliferation in South Africa’, in U.S. Military Involvement in Southern Africa (Boston, Ma: Western Massachusetts Association of Concerned Scholars, South End Press, 1978).
Quoted by James Adams, The Unnatural Alliance (New York, London: Quartet, 1984), p. 184.
Leonard S. Spector, The New Nuclear Nations (New York: The Carnegie Endowment, Vintage Books, 1985), p. 217.
Leonard S. Spector, Going Nuclear (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Books, 1987), p. 221.
See in particular Ronald Walters, ‘The September 22, 1979 Mystery Flash: Did South Africa Detonate a Nuclear Bomb?’ (Washington, DC: The Washington Office on Africa, 21 May 1985);
Eliot Marshall, ‘Flash not Missed by Vela still Veiled in Mist’, Science, 30 November 1979; Adams, Unnatural Alliance, Ch. 10.
Thomas O’Toole, Washington Post, 1 January 1980.
Thomas O’Toole, Guardian, 31 January 1980; Adams, Unnatural Alliance, pp. 187–8.
Eliot Marshall ‘Navy Lab Concludes the Vela Saw a Bomb’ in Science, 29 August 1980, p. 997.
John F. Burns, Washington Post, 30 April 1977.
See Robert Jaster, South Africa and its Neighbours: The Dynamics of Regional Conflict, Adelphi Paper No. 209 (London: IISS, 1986), pp. 18–20.
Kenneth Adelman and Richard Knight, ‘Can South Africa Go Nuclear?’, Orbis, 3 (Fall 1979), pp. 642–3.
Michele A. Flournoy, ‘The South African Nuclear Threat: A New Variable’, in South Africa in Crisis: Regional and International Responses, Report No. 28 (New York: International Peace Academy, 1988).
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© 1989 International Institute for Strategic Studies
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Jaster, R.S. (1989). Pretoria’s Nuclear Diplomacy. In: The Defence of White Power. Studies in International Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19601-2_10
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