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development. Located in the desert west of Pretoria, the site was named Pelindaba, Zulu for ‘we do not talk about this at all’. Of its 900 employees, not a single one was black. (A sister site, opened nearby in 1970, was called Valindaba, which means ‘we do not talk about this any more’.) Prime Minister John Vorster announced, in July 1970, that South Africa was enriching uranium, but insisted that it had only benign intentions. Among these, it happened, was the creation of peaceful nuclear explosives (PNEs), pioneered by the United States through a program called ‘Plowshare’. The South Africans thought they might use PNEs for mining or construction. They nevertheless kept the project secret—an acknowledgment, no doubt, that peaceful and military nuclear explosions were difficult to tell apart.

Also top secret were South African plans to build an atomic weapon. Following Vorster’s 1970 announcement, the AEB decided to focus on the gun-style bomb design used by the Americans in Little Boy. The Y-Plant at Valindaba began enriching weapons-grade uranium, though the process was plagued by inefficiencies, and the refined Ur emerged only slowly. The Americans had continued to help, supplying Safari-1 with weapons-grade fuel for a decade after its delivery, but by the mid-1970s the political climate had shifted. Growing popular anger with the segregationist apartheid policy led to American sanctions on trade and investment in South Africa, and the regime’s mounting supply of refined uranium made an obvious target for Pretoria’s American critics. US shipments were suspended in 1975. At that point, South Africa turned to France, West Germany, and especially Israel for help; growing nuclear polycentrism offered multiple opportunities for exploitation. David Albright estimates that most of the assistance given South Africa through these sources was relatively unsophisticated, though it was supplied ‘in violation of international sanctions’ against the regime. There were also allegations that the Germans provided advanced jet nozzles for the uranium refinement process and the Israelis offered help with weapon design. Whatever aid they got, the South Africans had their device ready for testing by August 1977, though they lacked sufficient uranium for it. They bored two test shafts deep into the Kalahari Desert and prepared to join the nuclear club, or nearly to do so: the test would be ‘cold’ in the absence of fissile fuel. Then a Soviet satellite photographed the Kalahari test site, and Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev immediately informed the Americans and West Europeans. The powers issued warnings—even the French, thus embarrassed, threatened to end their nuclear cooperation with Pretoria—and South Africa cancelled the test. Weapons development nevertheless continued at Pelindaba and Valindaba. By the late 1970s South Africa had six, gun-type nuclear weapons in its arsenal and enough enriched uranium to fuel them, and was developing a missile system for their delivery.

The government also had a strategic plan in place for their use. Rather like Israel’s, it was predicated on ambiguity, the hope that South Africa’s neighbors would forbear from attacking the apartheid state out of uncertainty as to the extremity of its response. Should that fail, and should armies mass against it, Pretoria would quietly tell the United States and other western governments that it had nuclear weapons, and thus that it behooved them to act to prevent a war that could have catastrophic consequences for southern Africa. If the West did not respond constructively and the threat of invasion remained, South Africa reserved the right to test a device under or above ground. The government’s hope, concludes Albright, was to ‘force’ western nations ‘to place South Africa under their nuclear umbrella in the event of a crisis’.

It never came to this, and in fact the story of South Africa’s nuclear program ended as satisfactorily as stories concerning nuclear weapons can possibly do. South African security fears had much to do with the unsettled state of Namibia