A Newly Opened Book

THE QUESTION HAD BEEN HANGING THERE THROUGH years of isolation and sanctions against the apartheid regime: Did South Africa have the Bomb? Last Wednesday in Cape Town, President F.W. de Klerk finally provided an answer, and then some: Yes. But not just one. There were six.

Opening the book on his government's nuclear-weapons program, De Klerk announced that after he became President in 1989, he ordered the dismantling and destruction of the secret "nuclear-fission devices" that had been manufactured in the 1970s. The government's strategy at that time, he said, was to use the weapons' "deterrent capability." If a Soviet-backed onslaught against South Africa became critical enough, the major powers would be told of South Africa's nuclear arms capacity to persuade them to intervene.

That strategy was obviated, however, by the removal of the Soviet threat and the start of political negotiations within South Africa. In 1991 De Klerk's government acceded to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and signed an inspection agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency. "South Africa's hands are clean," said De Klerk. "We are concealing nothing."