How many states have abandoned nuclear weapons?
South Africa is the only state to have built its own nuclear arsenal and then completely dismantled it — the first case of real nuclear disarmament. The last apartheid government under President F. W. de Klerk made this dismantlement decision and completed the dismantlement before handing over power to African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela in the early 1990s. Also in the mid-1990s, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine agreed to relinquish nuclear weapons left on their soil when the Soviet Union collapsed (though these states never had complete control of these weapons). Many other states have started nuclear weapons programs and then verifiably abandoned them, concluding that it was in their national interest not to have nuclear weapons. Indeed, there are more states that have started nuclear weapons programs and given them up than there are states with nuclear weapons — so efforts to stop the spread of nuclear weapons succeed more often than they fail.
