Small nations can occasionally do surprising things when they feel like it. Israel successfully developed nuclear weapons when they only had two million people in the country.
"In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.
By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."
Seymour Hersh's book 'The Sampson Option' goes into more detail.
South Africa was in the same boat in needing a weapon of absolute last resort ... instead of Arab armies we had to contend with soviet supplied cuban troops on our border.
We had 4 devices by then and developed with help of Israel an intermediate range ballistic missile based on their Jericho-2.
Fortunately sanity prevailed in the end and the bombs and missile program got scrapped when a political settlement was achieved.
At least when Israel was developing its nuclear bomb, its neighbours were not particularly minded to compromise. Contrast, for example, the Freedom Charter (a fifties document!), which was so studiously nonracial that the PAC had to split off:
> South Africa belongs to all who live in it, black and white…that only a democratic state, based on the will of all the people, can secure to all their birthright without distinction of colour, race, sex or belief
At this point the possible threat was clearly domestic blacks, not nearby colonies, and compromise with them was clearly quite possible. CODESA didn't happen earlier because the Broederbond took so long to change its mind—had it, it could have happened decades earlier.
The SA army was also in conventional terms quite sufficient to prevent any foreign invasion. Even Rhodesia with P.K. van der Byl and the other ludicrous types who congregated in Salisbury hotels could manage for over a decade. Armscor on the other hand was world-leading, and none of SA’s neighbours had anything like that.
> soviet supplied cuban troops on our border
They were on the Namibian border, which was from 1966 was no longer really South Africa’s. In any case SA militarily held its own—it inflicted far more casualties than it suffered and maintained control of Namibia. It seems to make much more sense to interpret withdrawal as a political decision to cease the indefensible occupation of Namibia, instead of evidence that a nuclear bomb was strategically necessary.
>... instead of Arab armies we had to contend with soviet supplied cuban troops on our border.
I know Africa's colonization/imperialism and cold war politics were inseparable, but the fact that South Africa's apartheid government was the sole remaining minority-led government in the region[1] seems material here
> Fortunately sanity prevailed in the end and the bombs and missile program got scrapped when a political settlement was achieved.
Sounds like someone didn't want a black-led government in charge of the nukes[2]. I agree with the end result; but I question the motives.
1. Neighboring nations gained majority rule through armed conflict - excluding Namibia, which was effectively a client state of South Africa after being ceded by Germany in a world war.
2. Which would have been destabilizing, considering the white secessionist sentiment (minorority, but significant). There was a legitimate concern over right-wing separatists who were agitating for an autonomous white homeland/territory.
