Oil embargo against nuclear program

South Africa, under white minority rule, had been working on its own atomic weapons since 1949. Israel, created a year earlier, supplied nuclear technology in exchange for South African uranium. Since 1974, a focused military program began, within which six of the seven planned nuclear devices were manufactured by the end of the 1980s.

In 1977, Moscow and Washington, having learned through intelligence sources about a nuclear test being prepared by Pretoria, threatened South Africa with large-scale international sanctions, and not just a ban on arms supplies, and thus the test was disrupted. The concern of the leading powers - members of the "nuclear club" - increased after a bright flash in the South Atlantic was recorded by their reconnaissance satellites on September 23, 1979. According to experts, it could mean a test explosion of a nuclear device on a South African ship.

Sanctions were introduced against South Africa, and in the mid-1980s an oil embargo was introduced: fuel supplies from abroad were prohibited to a state that did not have its own oil. This forced South African President Peter Botha (Minister of Defense and curator of the nuclear program in the 1970s) to declare in 1988 his readiness to discuss the issue of transferring South Africa's nuclear facilities under the control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In August 1988, Botha sent a delegation to Vienna, which began negotiations with representatives of the USSR and the USA on South Africa's accession to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). The following year, Botha was replaced as president by Frederik de Klerk, under whom South Africa signed the NPT in July 1991.

In 1993, a year before the handover of power to Nelson Mandela, South Africa's popularly elected first black president, Frederik de Klerk declared South Africa free of weapons of mass destruction and invited IAEA inspectors to the country. They visited all nuclear facilities in South Africa and confirmed de Klerk’s assertions that South Africa’s nuclear military program had been curtailed and the warheads had been dismantled.

Alexander SAMOKHOTKIN