By Colin Salt
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It is an ironic coincidence that two of the African countries with the most substantial nuclear weapons programs existed on different ends of the continent and could not have been farther apart in terms of effectiveness. Beginning with the success, it's well known among atomic scholars that apartheid South Africa succeeded in building several nuclear bombs in the 1980s. Six were built, with the first being completed in 1982.
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One advantage for nuclear proliferation analysts is that South Africa provides a good best (for them)/worst (for their opponents, if not everyone else) case scenario of how a smaller country could approach a WMD program. Because the program was dismantled completely and its workings exposed totally after the ANC victory, there's a level of knowledge about it that wouldn't exist in a current nuclear state such as Pakistan or North Korea. South Africa managed to build most of the necessary components themselves, including an innovative at the time (albeit an inefficient dead end) aerodynamic enrichment plant for the uranium. They never spent more than the equivalent of low double digit million US dollars in a year and kept confirmation about its infrastructure from the outside world until it was too late.
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The South African bombs were gun-types of the same basic style as Hiroshima's Little Boy. The simplest style of nuclear weapon to understand and make, it essentially just consists of one subcritical mass of highly enriched uranium being fired out of a cannon into another subcritical mass, causing the nuclear reaction. Compared to the far more common implosion type (a set of synchronized charges squeezes the fissile material into a critical mass, to oversimplify it), they are incredibly inefficient. Nonetheless, the goal was a simple achievable design. Production models had become small enough to fit inside guided glide bombs known as H-3 Raptors. The launch platform of said bombs was the Blackburn Buccaneer.
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South Africa had more advanced designs and capable delivery systems being planned, but they were not the highest national priority and ended the moment apartheid did.
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Though an undeniable engineering success, there are plenty of caveats to the South African story. It was a political prestige project more than anything else, and it could have avoided scrutiny in part because of how little was spent on it and what it achieved in practice (simple warheads incapable of being delivered farther than the immediate neighbors). Though the production warheads were well-suited for tactical use, it was not a serious doctrinal role. The only official doctrine for how the regime would actually use them was not as an external deterrent. It was effectively a blackmail ruse, where they would be first announced and shown in the event of an existential threat, and then fired in a demonstration/test if necessary. The goal was to basically say to the western powers: "There are nukes here, it'd be a shame if they fell into the hands of radicals."
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Of course, strategy can change instantly, and the ANC was not unreasonably convinced that their opponents would have used them in warfare against enemy targets - such as cities that had fallen out of their control. In any event, the program was dismantled later in the 1990s.
There is a link that connects South Africa and Libya, the second country in this article. That is, unsurprisingly, the legendary scientist and broker A. Q. Khan. As ANC governments massively downsized the nation's defense industry, its employees and suppliers moved to greener pastures. Fittingly, much of the former apartheid nuclear program hopped right into the Khan network as suppliers.
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This brings me to Gaddafi's tragicomic attempts at getting the bomb. Libya's on and off attempts at nuclear acquisition could likely be the worst-run of any serious attempt to build nuclear weapons. An extreme lack of local talent meant that Gaddafi depended completely (and I do mean completely) on outside imports. He even reportedly asked to buy finished warheads directly, which was obviously refused. They turned first to the USSR for a cradle-to-grave turnkey nuclear infrastructure, trying in desperation to build their program around ordinary light-water power reactors. This deal fell through for both economic and political reasons as Libya tumbled in the 1980s. Then came the Khan network, which was happy to sell-at prices that they more or less dictated. In practice, Khan and his suppliers simply took the money, dumped the bare minimum on Libya, and laughed.
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The complete inability of the Libyans to do anything by themselves meant that the centrifuges and other components just sat there wasting away until the network was busted and the WMD plans abandoned. Libya's ambitions also went under the radar until the exposure of Khan's scheme, but given that A: Their own different government agencies didn't know what the others were doing (turns out a paranoid dictatorship can have that problem) and B: The program had accomplished more or less nothing of substance meant there was little evidence there, which would have existed if any kind of progress had been made.
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Now for the "Alternate" part of alternate history.
The most common pop-history commentary goes like this: "Libya agreed to give up its nukes in exchange for western recognition only to get backstabbed in 2011 and thus ensuring no one else [usually North Korea] would ever make such a deal again." One can rightfully oppose (as I did) the 2011 war and still recognize this is oversimplified at best and false at worst. A different take would be "Libya gained temporary-in-hindsight concessions without changing its actual spots [i.e. the nature of its regime] in exchange for basically nothing, giving up only a totally failed program that just lost its supplier and was nowhere even slightly near being able to make anything dangerous".
The structural possibilities for alternate outcomes are just far more prominent in the South African case than the Libyan one. It may have been implausible, but their program could technically have been scaled up or given higher priority if Pretoria had really wanted it. Libya could not. A good analogy is how whatever the virtues or likelihood of Operation Downfall, the Americans could have physically supported a large amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands or something of a similar scale in 1945-6. The Germans could not have done the same for an invasion of Britain in 1940-1.
(For the question of Ukraine or another non-Russian SSR like fellow technical inheritor Kazakhstan, the answer is 'They had no chance of keeping or using the gigantic arsenal left on their soil after 1991, but they had the technical ability to make a smaller nuclear arsenal. However, there was absolutely no money or political capital to do such a thing.' But that's a story for another time...)
 Colin Salt is an author who, among other works, wrote The Smithtown Unit and its sequel Box Press for Sea Lion, and runs the Fuldapocalypse Fiction review blog.