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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

• _djo_ 9y ago
  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.