The Countries That Gave It Up

There is a short list of states that had nuclear weapons, or came close, and no longer do. It is worth reading slowly, because each case teaches something different, and the lesson most governments now draw from the list is not the one its members intended.

Start with South Africa, the only state to build nuclear weapons and then dismantle them entirely on its own decision.

Its programme produced six gun-type devices using highly enriched uranium, with a seventh under construction, during the late 1970s and the 1980s. They were built in secret, and their purpose was as much political as military: in a crisis, the government intended to reveal the capability in the hope of drawing Western powers in on its side. The threat it worried about was Soviet-backed forces in Angola.

Then the threat receded. The 1988 accords ended South Africa's part in the Angolan war and led to Namibian independence and the withdrawal of Cuban troops. F. W. de Klerk became president in 1989, and the devices were dismantled over the next two years. South Africa joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty in July 1991, accepted inspections, and in March 1993 de Klerk told parliament what had been done. The International Atomic Energy Agency later verified the account.

Why it happened is still argued. One reading stresses security: the enemy the bombs were meant for had gone. Another stresses politics: a white minority government negotiating its own end had reasons not to leave nuclear weapons to whoever came next. The two are not exclusive, and the evidence supports some of each.

Ukraine is a different kind of case, and the difference usually gets lost.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, roughly 1,900 strategic warheads were left on Ukrainian territory, which on paper made Ukraine the third-largest nuclear power in the world. Belarus and Kazakhstan held weapons too. But Ukraine had custody without control. The launch codes and the command system remained in Moscow, and making the weapons usable would have required years of work on systems designed to prevent exactly that, in the face of a United States and a Russia that agreed on little else except that it should not happen.

So Ukraine negotiated. On 5 December 1994, in Budapest, Russia, Britain and the United States signed a memorandum in which they undertook to respect Ukraine's independence, sovereignty and existing borders, to refrain from the threat or use of force against it, and to seek Security Council action if it became the victim of aggression in which nuclear weapons were used. Ukraine joined the treaty as a non-nuclear state, and the last warheads went to Russia in 1996.

Read the wording again. These are assurances, not guarantees. Nobody promised to defend Ukraine, and the only commitment to act was limited to a nuclear attack. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full invasion in 2022, and it is hard to describe either as consistent with the memorandum. Britain and the United States have given Ukraine large amounts of support since 2022, but nothing in the text required them to.

Libya completes the list. In December 2003, two months after a ship carrying centrifuge parts bound for its programme was intercepted, Muammar Gaddafi's government announced that Libya would abandon its weapons of mass destruction. The parts had come through the network run by the Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan, which unravelled shortly afterwards. Libya's programme was years from producing a weapon. In 2011, during an uprising backed by NATO air strikes under a Security Council resolution, Gaddafi was overthrown and killed.

There are two honest ways to read these three cases.

The first is that each decision was rational on its own terms. South Africa's bombs had lost their purpose. Ukraine could not operate what it held, needed Western economic help far more than warheads, and would have faced isolation for trying. Libya had been caught, and gave up a programme that was more liability than asset. On this reading the cases say nothing general about the value of the bomb.

The second reading looks at the sequence. North Korea kept its programme and has not been attacked. Two of the three states that gave theirs up later suffered precisely what a nuclear weapon is supposed to deter. Pyongyang draws this conclusion openly: when an American official spoke in 2018 of applying a Libya model to North Korea, the response was immediate and furious.

Whether that inference is correct may matter less than the fact that it is drawn. Every future negotiation over a nuclear programme now has to answer the question these cases raise, which is what a promise made in exchange for disarmament is actually worth. The Budapest Memorandum's answer was a set of assurances. The lesson others took is that an assurance is a promise about behaviour and a guarantee is a promise about consequences, and that only the second is worth trading a weapon for.