
What we can learn from the only country to give up its own nuclear weapons - smacktoward
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/03/what-can-we-learn-from-south-africas-decision-to-give-up-its-nukes.html
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Erlangolem
What about The Ukraine? We can learn a lesson from their choice to give up
their nuclear arsenal too. South Africa gave up a program, Ukraine gave up an
arsenal.

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_djo_
True, we can, but because Ukraine's weapons were inherited the incentives were
different. The country had much to lose and little to gain in keeping the
weapons and as an independent country it never had a foreign policy that
required their development or use.

South Africa gave up both a nuclear weapons programme and a stockpile of six
deliverable weapons, along with an IRBM/ICBM programme. That makes it a closer
match to countries like Iran, albeit up to a point. Something often forgotten
is that South Africa gave up its nuclear weapons as part of a general transfer
of power to the black majority and the wide scale reduction of its military
capability in response to the collapse of the USSR.

