As historians continue to unpack the legacies of the cold war, perhaps no security issue looms larger than the specter of nuclear weapons. Robin Möser’s Disarming Apartheid considers the complex and often clandestine process by which South Africa’s white supremacist government, the only African state to have developed nuclear weapons, dismantled its nuclear arsenal and eventually signed on to the global Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). This is a vital story for it illustrates that nuclear disarmament is possible given the right circumstances and motivations, including both pressure and support from other nuclear states. It is, moreover, important for understanding how the cold war played out during, and paralleled, African independence struggles.

The African continent was central to the development of nuclear energy capabilities and weapons as well as a contested hot zone for cold war conflicts. The Shinkolobwe mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was, after all, the source of the highly enriched uranium that made America’s Manhattan Project possible. As Möser notes, South Africa also had highly sought-after uranium as well as advanced mining and technological capacity that could be developed. In Disarming Apartheid, he shows how in the post-World War II context, South Africa’s alignment with the West afforded the white apartheid state, and its cold war allies—the United States, Britain, and France—the opportunity for mutual cooperation to develop its nuclear capabilities for generating electricity and especially weapons. The story Möser tells is one of duplicity and secrecy. There was duplicity on the part of Western powers that turned a blind eye to the human rights abuses of apartheid in exchange for uranium and assurances from South Africa that it would remain a bastion against communism on the continent. Möser argues that it was chiefly through the American “Atoms For Peace” program and related technical assistance that South Africa was able to develop its nuclear weapons arsenal. And, as he shows, there was also secrecy on the part of South Africa as it engaged in a “dance” with the International Atomic Energy Agency to avoid signing on to the NPT while it forged ahead with the weapons program.

In succeeding chapters, Möser deftly shows how, as global opprobrium grew over apartheid, the South African state became both increasingly isolated and increasingly self-sufficient, especially in both military and nuclear arms capabilities. He ultimately makes the case that it was the end of the cold war, and particularly the diminishing threat from Soviet and Cuban-aligned front-line states such as Angola and Mozambique, that enabled the then reformist head of the apartheid state, F.W. De Klerk, to dismantle their nuclear arsenal and to convince the white security state to sign on to the NPT. Möser enumerates some striking findings about this process. Based on key interviews, including with De Klerk himself, Möser argues that domestic political imperatives, and especially fears about a white conservative backlash against the dismantling of apartheid delayed the eventual signing of the NPT. Another key finding was that the apartheid government felt it important to first ensure all neighboring African front-line states signed on to the NPT to demonstrate a political win for South Africa. Perhaps Möser’s most significant finding was the revelation that the United States and the Soviet Union cooperated in pressuring the front-line states into compliance as a means of swaying the South Africans into signing. He finally argues that perhaps the most challenging feature of signing onto the NPT for South Africa was the persistence of other sanctions based on the issue of apartheid that would have undermined any benefits of ongoing cooperation for the exchange of peaceful nuclear technology.

Despite a clear, cogent argument, Möser offers little in the way of an analysis of the role Black politics played during a period when African opposition to apartheid was so clearly the elephant in the room, domestically and globally. There is scant mention of the African National Congress (ANC) position against the proliferation of nuclear weapons, or its relationship with front-line states. Nor is there meaningful consideration of the impact of the ANC’s armed wing, Umkhonto We Sizwe’s attack in 1982 on the country’s only nuclear power plant at Koeberg. While Möser concedes that there may have been concerns among members of the white security state about the ANC inheriting a nuclear arsenal, and that this may have been an impetus for disarmament, he noted he found no evidence to support this in the archives or among those he interviewed. The ANC, nevertheless, did take a clear stance on disarmament, and one wonders if ANC sources may have shed light on this, especially for the period during the negotiations to end apartheid. The focus of the book remains clearly on the white state and its Western allies. He does, however, point out that the democratically elected ANC government continues to hold significant stores of highly enriched uranium despite American efforts to get them to relinquish it. Still, the writing is direct and efficient in delivering a compelling argument, and the text is enlivened with photos and interesting South African newspaper cartoons that add to the important story about a successful case of nuclear disarmament.