Date of Award

Fall 2025

Project Type

Thesis

Program or Major

History

Degree Name

Master of Arts

First Advisor

Kurk Dorsey

Second Advisor

Funso Afolayan

Third Advisor

Julia Rodriguez

Abstract

In August 1977, a Soviet satellite obtained evidence that the South African government was preparing to detonate a nuclear device. Though the test never occurred, one thing was for certain: Pretoria sought the bomb. This thesis traces the path to that moment and argues that while détente, in Henry Kissinger’s vision, was meant to preserve global order by managing great-power rivalry and avoiding direct confrontation, it could not be all things at once – and South Africa slipped through the cracks. Both Washington and Moscow explicitly condemned the spread of nuclear weapons, yet the logic of détente – prioritizing stability between superpowers over enforcement at the margins – created permissive conditions in which rivalries were managed at the center while instability was tolerated at the periphery. South Africa, strategically useful to the West, exploited these contradictions. As regional conflict intensified and internal unrest deepened in the mid-1970s, the apartheid regime grew increasingly convinced that nuclear weapons were essential to its survival. Drawing on declassified government documents, archival newspapers, and United Nations records, this study reframes South Africa’s nuclear pursuit not as a failure of enforcement or a bilateral anomaly, but as a product of Cold War realpolitik. Ultimately, Pretoria garnered enough space and time to exercise its own atomic agency – that is, the ability for states on the Cold War’s periphery to exploit systemic contradictions in the global nuclear order. By tracing the geopolitical chain of events from the collapse of the Portuguese empire to the 1977 Kalahari test site revelation, this study illustrates how regional destabilization, the Sino-Soviet rivalry, and US reactive diplomacy converged to allow an outcome that ran counter to the spirit of détente – the erosion of nuclear restraint.

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