During South Africa's apartheid era the country's nuclear security was of major concern to the international community because of its nuclear capabilities - it had six operational nuclear weapons - and the hostile environment in which the white minority government found itself regionally due to its racist policies. But the country's nuclear weapons programme was decommissioned in the early 1990s as part of the transition to democracy, and consequently it was thought that much of the threat its nuclear programme posed to the wider world had dissipated.
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