Home World Nuclear bomb: Some have it, some hide it, others want it and some have given them up

Nuclear bomb: Some have it, some hide it, others want it and some have given them up

Helena Tecedeiro

Iran is currently the strongest candidate to join the nine nuclear weapon countries – USA, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. But there are also those, like South Africa, who gave up on the bomb after developing it.

“We had to convince the world that we were not playing games, that we destroyed those bombs, that we can handle every milligram of matter that was in them,” said Frederik De Klerk in 2012 in Washington, recalling his decision, almost two decades rather, to destroy the atomic bombs that South Africa had developed. In 1993 it was a South Africa steeped in tensions and hatred that saw De Klerk negotiate with a recently released Nelson Mandela the end of apartheid and the start of a multiracial regime. And it was this country that saw the president announce on television that they had built six atomic bombs in secret, but that they had dismantled and ended the nuclear program.

To this day, South Africa is the only country to have developed its own atomic bomb, willingly giving up on it.

Read more at Diário de Notícias

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