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—unsettled, it should be said, in good part because of South African meddling there—and the presence, during the late 1970s and through the 1980s, of Cuban combat forces in Angola, there by invitation of one of the parties fighting for control of the former Portuguese colony, and over the objection of another one, which was bolstered by the South African military. By 1989 there was a calming of tensions in both places: Namibia was on its way to independence, and the Cubans had left Angola following an agreement between South Africa, Angola, and Cuba. The Cold War was ending, easing South African concerns that the Soviets might sponsor the invasion or subversion of the apartheid state. And it was clear that having nuclear weapons had not enhanced South Africa’s prestige as much as it had secured its status as an international pariah. When F. W. De Klerk was elected president in September 1989, he decided, most significantly, to dismantle apartheid and install democracy. He also decided to undo the nuclear-weapons program and sign the NonProliferation Treaty. Within months, the six nuclear bombs were taken apart, their enriched uranium cores were rendered benign, the nuclear plants were decontaminated, and even the harmless metal bomb jackets were destroyed. Inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency verified all this in 1991. Two years later the South African Parliament, transformed by the crumbling of apartheid, made it illegal for South Africans to develop or help develop nuclear weapons. For the first time in history, a nation had reversed its nuclear development program and eliminated all its weapons.

5. China: The people’s bomb

In 1958 the People’s Republic of China embarked on Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Leap Forward’, in which China’s agriculture, already collectivized, was further consolidated into gigantic ‘people’s communes’, and in which communities and even individuals obligingly built ‘backyard smelters’ to fabricate steel. Out in Hunan province, in China’s west and through which ran the notorious ‘malaria belt’ wherein the disease was rampant, many thousands of peasants joined geology teams to prospect for uranium. Scrambling over rough terrain, wielding Geiger counters and pickaxes, the peasants managed to unearth a good deal of the stuff, which they fashioned, on the teams’ instructions, into yellowcake ready for enrichment. The Great Leap generally registered somewhere between a disappointment and a disaster: in the first category, the backyard smelters produced little in the way of useful steel, while the agricultural collectivization program, combined with rash exhortations by the government to overeat and the export of ‘surplus’ grain, caused starvation on a massive scale; as many as thirty million people died. For China’s nuclear program, the Great Leap’s legacy was mixed. As John W Lewis and Xue Litai note, the reckless quest to find and process uranium on a mass scale left the land gouged and polluted and wasted uranium that was inexpertly dug out and clumsily handled. On the other hand, the peculiar, land-rush approach to uranium prospecting yielded 150 tons of Ur concentrate, China’s first batch, and, according to Chinese authorities, sped the development of a nuclear weapon by a year. ‘In this limited sense,’ write Lewis and Xue, ‘the first Chinese bomb was a “people’s bomb”.’

Mao had once scorned the American atomic bomb as ‘a paper tiger’, used by the ‘reactionaries ...to scare people’. But, following the Korean War, during which US troops had encroached on China’s eastern border, and especially after the crisis in the Taiwan Straits in 1954-5, featuring explicit threats by President Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles of nuclear strikes against Chinese ‘military targets’, Mao decided that China needed a nuclear-weapons program too. Like several other nations, China had the main elements for such a project already in place. In the late 1930s the physicist Peng Huanwu worked with Max Born at Edinburgh. An expert in quantum field theory, Peng would become chief of the