“The major prize”: apartheid South Africa’s accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, 1988–91

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the final years of South Africa’s nuclear-weapon program, particularly on the decision-making process leading up to the signature of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) by the South African government in 1991. In August 1988, after two decades of defiance, negotiations between the apartheid government and the NPT depository powers (the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Soviet Union) ensued at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. Despite South Africa being the only state to give up its indigenously developed nuclear weapons and subsequently join the nonproliferation regime, little is known about how the national position on NPT accession and IAEA safeguards evolved. Research carried out in multiple archives using hitherto untapped primary sources and interviews with key actors from several countries show how domestic and regional political dynamics influenced Pretoria’s position on entering the nonproliferation regime. In the process, the F.W. de Klerk government managed to skillfully exploit international proliferation fears to advance its own agenda, thereby connecting South African NPT accession with that of the neighboring Frontline States coalition of Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.     

Fighting a Just War in the Midst of an Unreasonable International Strife: World War I and the Collapse of the Central European System of the Triple Imperial Dominion

ABSTRACT

This article constitutes an attempt to demonstrate the complexity of factors affecting the legitimate acquisition and reasonable exercise by a political community of the right to war as specified in the just war criteria of jus ad bellum. To achieve this purpose, a brief analysis is presented of the intentional participation in World War I of thousands of Polish volunteers forming military units deployed by the Central Powers on the Austrian-Russian front. Considered in light of the standard principles of just war, the military enterprise of the Polish Legions, as they were called, turns out to be a paradoxical instance of warfare which, while being part of a state-to-state aggression, must be deemed compliant with all the principles in question. As a means of explaining this paradox, a modification of the concept of justified intervention is proposed, embracing military efforts aimed at the ultimate defeat of all the (unjustly) warring parties operating within a given territory. In consonance with the classic just war approach, it is also argued that the justification for such an intervention is essentially dependent on its being initiated by, or attributable to, an unquestionable state agent acting in defence of the state’s basic prerogatives.