Africa is navigating a pivotal postcolonial transition driven by a deliberate pursuit of strategic and energy autonomy to sustain its rapid demographic and industrial expansion. A critical tension has emerged between international nonproliferation frameworks, namely the Treaty of Pelindaba and the African Commission on Nuclear Energy (AFCONE), and the sovereign right of African states to develop civilian nuclear energy. In an era defined by Great Power Competition, this tension is accelerating a geopolitical shift in Egypt and the nations along the Sahelo-Saharan strip, the narrow belt between the Sahara and the Sub-Saharan savannas, stretching from the Atlantic to the Red Sea. This is happening as they are increasingly bypassing traditional Western channels to sign nuclear memoranda with global alternatives such as Russia’s Rosatom. The structural limitations of the current African Union disarmament architecture are being tested by sovereign imperatives. To reduce proliferation vulnerabilities and external interference, the continental framework must evolve from a passive monitoring mechanism into a dynamic legal shield across Africa’s developing nuclear landscape. 

Introduction 

Africa is currently undergoing a pivotal phase in its post-colonial history, characterized by an explicit shift toward comprehensive sovereignty. This dynamic manifests as a dual transition: strategic autonomy aimed at securing the continent through regional means, and energy autonomy essential to sustain the industrial development of a rapidly expanding demographic base. However, this quest for technological advancement, specifically through civilian nuclear energy, clashes with an increasingly polarized global security environment. Now, a central conceptual and practical tension arises. How can the African Union‘s (AU) disarmament architecture oversee this transition without local nations perceiving it as an external technological constraint or a vector of vulnerability mitigation vis-à-vis global nuclear powers? 

The Pelindaba Framework Confronting New Geopolitical Imperatives 

The continent’s disarmament architecture historically rests upon the African Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Pelindaba, which established Africa as a zone free of nuclear weapons while promoting the peaceful use of the atom. While this legal framework and its executive body, the AFCONE, have successfully prevented military proliferation, their structural limitations are becoming apparent under the new paradigm of absolute sovereignty. Conceived within a post-Cold War logic, this architecture is increasingly critiqued by African scholars as a passive monitoring structure heavily influenced by the Western Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) requirements, inadvertently restricting the transfer of dual-use technologies to the Global South. 

Conversely, AFCONE, headquartered in South Africa, represents an historic institutional success. By championing a modern, pragmatic vision, AFCONE actively promotes the peaceful application of nuclear technologies in vital sectors such as medicine, agriculture, and power generation. This strategy demonstrates that targeted, sovereign institutional management can transform budgetary limitations into opportunities, ensuring technical efficiency and non-proliferation compliance without compromising regional autonomy. 

Great Power Competition and the “State-Led Strategic Vision” 

Africa’s transition toward energy autonomy extends beyond technical parameters. It represents a calculated act of geopolitical repositioning driven by state-led strategic visions. In an international order regulating civilian nuclear technologies under strict non-proliferation banners, African states are actively asserting their right to development through decisive executive leadership. This top-down political willpower challenges the traditional monopoly of Western regulatory frameworks by treating energy access as a fundamental national security imperative. 

This disruptive paradigm is reshaping regional alliances and redrawing maps of strategic dependency. Egypt’s El Dabaa, nuclear power plant megaproject and the strategic shift of Sahelian heads of state signing new nuclear memoranda with Russia’s state-owned corporation, Rosatom, reflect a top-down executive momentum. The “State-led strategic vision” has become the primary arbiter between international collective security demands and the immediate requirement of national industrialization. This shift introduces a complex variable into global deterrence tracking, as local leaders increasingly bypass traditional Western commercial and political channels. By leveraging foreign partnerships that do not impose conditional governance clauses, African states are redefining the geopolitical balance of technology transfers in the Global South. 

Resource Securitization and the Sahelian Laboratory 

While political leadership drives policy, access to raw materials stems from geography. The abundance of uranium, particularly in the Sahelo-Saharan strip, imposes a severe security responsibility upon regional leaders. Long exploited under frameworks that yielded minimal tangible benefits for local populations, these strategic reserves are now the focus of intense sovereign reclamation. Securing the front-end of the nuclear fuel cycle has evolved from a commercial negotiation into a matter of state survival. 

In an environment marked by volatile asymmetric threats and state fragility, proving that African states can secure their own strategic resources is essential to prevent foreign military interference and secure global supply chains. Consequently, the Sahel has become a contemporary laboratory where the imperatives of local scientific capacity building and sovereign resource control are actively tested against global non-proliferation norms. The critical vulnerability no longer lies solely in the physical diversion of material, but at the intersection of physical infrastructure security and tactical hybrid threats. Unmanned aerial systems, border penetration by non-state actors, and specialized cyber-attacks targeting industrial control devices represent a new spectrum of risks that the African Union’s legacy framework is ill-equipped to counter. 

Conclusion 

Ultimately, the African Union’s disarmament architecture must evolve from a passive doctrine of non-proliferation into a dynamic legal and political shield that protects African states’ right to technological emancipation. This evolution requires converting AFCONE into an active operations intelligence hub that coordinates real-time security threats across newcomer nuclear states. For global strategic analysts, understanding this shift is critical. The Sahel’s technological transition cannot be ignored or suppressed through restrictive regimes. Instead, it must be matched by a rigorous, collaborative culture of physical nuclear security, international safeguards verification, and cyber resilience to reduce proliferation risks while accommodating Africa’s inevitable and legitimate energy transition. 

Lanssina TO, PMP, holds a DESS in Management (Ing.) and serves as an international climate negotiator. He is a Vertic Hub Africa Member, GSTE/NDV of Vertic Member, Founder of NewComer Global, and Founder of IGNIS-University for NewComers in Nuclear (Virtual). He currently serves as the Director of Publicity for the African Nuclear Society, conducting strategic research on nuclear education, newcomer state integration, environmental diplomacy, and regional security architectures across the African continent. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

The African Union Disarmament Architecture: Balancing Autonomy and Proliferation Risks  was originally published on Global Security Review.

These domains and areas are being weaponized for strategic purposes, as adversaries target cross-domain North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) interests with the intent of weakening the Western security architecture and fragmenting alliance cohesion. The Trump administration must work closely with NATO allies to confront the many challenges that face them.

Strategic challenges, such as the Arctic, deep sea, and space, and the threats they pose require improved joint military readiness, enhanced deterrence by denial capabilities, and improved intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

“Over the last 15 years,” writes Scott Savits, “the Arctic has become a renewed theatre of military competition…. [T]op Russian officials have referred to the Arctic as Russia’s ‘Mecca,’ and a large fraction of Russia’s economy is based on Arctic fossil fuels and minerals.” Frustrating Russian efforts to gain a strategic advantage in the Arctic is of paramount importance to NATO’s deterrence mission.

Russia gaining an advantage in the Arctic will enhance its ability to establish escalation dominance against NATO in the event of a conflict with the alliance. Deterring Russia from broadening the scope of conflict, by threatening NATO’s vital interests in the Arctic, remains critical in dissuading other adversaries, such as China, from seeking to gain similar advantage.

With China developing and deploying new detection technologies in anti-submarine warfare, American nuclear submarine capabilities are becoming increasingly vulnerable to detection and targeting. China’s “Death Star” satellite claims to possess detection capabilities that renders the ocean transparent for up to 500 meters beneath the surface, putting American submarines at risk.

In the space domain, it is estimated that loss of access to space would come at a cost of roughly One billion pounds per day to the British economy. The reported deployment of Russian anti-satellite weapons systems (ASAT) in space are clearly coercive moves designed to threaten NATO’s space assets.

Russia’s weaponization of space is especially concerning as NATO depends on space to conduct an array of operations across the spectrum of deterrence and defence. Most notably, NATO airpower relies on space-based and space-dependent systems to fulfil a series of critical security functions. Leveraging robust deterrence capabilities in orbit, through targeting Russian and Chinese space-based military and non-military assets, is critical to securing NATO’s vital interests in space.

Beyond seeking strategic advantage, China is also expanding and modernising its nuclear arsenal at an unprecedented rate since the end of the Cold War. The Pentagon forecasts that China will be a nuclear peer of the United States by 2035. The latest figures published by the Federation of American Scientists show that China now possesses at least 500 operationally deployed nuclear weapons—up 43 percent from 2020.

Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to undermine international norms by persisting in threats to use battlefield nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Russia also deploys dual-use satellite technologies in space, capable of carrying nuclear warheads into orbit, in direct contravention of long-standing international treaties such as the Outer Space Treaty (1967), which prohibits the weaponization and nuclearization of space.

Meanwhile, Iran, a latent nuclear state, coerces the West by threatening the weaponization of its nuclear program. Iran also infiltrated the West by creating extremist networks through community centers, laundering money in major European and American cities that is used by criminal gangs to plot and execute terrorist attacks.

Proxies supported by Iran, such as Hamas and Hezbollah, can also launch increasingly devastating attacks. Furthermore, attacks like October 7, 2024, or September 11, 2001, do not warrant nuclear retaliation. A nuclear response to a terrorist attack, depending on the attack, is likely a disproportionate response.

China and Russia also engage in subversive activities within the cyber domain, sowing discord by using disinformation, intellectual property theft, and malign interference to destabilize NATO member states. Cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure can also inflict severe levels of damage. The appropriateness of cross-domain responses is yet to be decided.

The cyber attacks against Estonia in 2007, which lasted for 22 days, did not result in the triggering of NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause. Yet, it was an attack on a NATO member state. The character of the attack complicated the process by which a viable and appropriate retaliatory response could be devised. In a multidomain threat landscape, hostile state actors conducting their operations in the grey zone can claim plausible deniability.

China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea also hold joint exercises, share intelligence, exchange military capabilities, and share a diplomatic and political kinship. This axis of Western adversaries shares the same geopolitical and economic objectives. They seek to replace the international rules-based order and establish alternative institutional frameworks to global order that undermine concepts such as democracy, human rights, rule of law, and national sovereignty.

Militarily, nowhere is this more apparent than in Russia, where Iranian drones and North Korean soldiers were provided to aid Putin’s war in Ukraine. Politically, emerging international blocs such as the BRICS demonstrate the extent to which countries like China and Russia are gaining traction in driving alternatives to the current order.

“As hybrid threats evolve to encompass the whole of digital and networked societies,” wrote Sean Monaghan, “so too will the capabilities required to deter them. A more complex threat environment will make predicting attacks and vulnerabilities more difficult, so nations may rely more on resilience.”

Hence, for deterrence to be effective today, credibility must incorporate more than hard power capabilities. Red lines must be communicated effectively across different channels. Resolve must be demonstrated through a force posture that includes a willingness to establish escalation dominance in a crisis scenario. The art of deterrence is also about determining and holding at risk what an adversary values.

As the outgoing US Secretary of Defence General (Ret.) Lloyd Austin said in 2022, cross-domain deterrence “is the right mix of technology, operational concepts, and capabilities—all woven together and networked in a way that is credible, flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause…. [It is] multidomain, spans numerous geographic areas of responsibility, is united with allies and partners, and is fortified by all instruments of national power.”

Ultimately, deterrence is about credibly threatening to impose unacceptable costs, by denial or punishment, on a would-be aggressor. Those costs must convince the would-be aggressor that they outweigh any potential gains made.

Therefore, it is imperative for the US and NATO to increase cross-domain capabilities to match those of adversaries. Adopting a combination of different violent and non-violent means, to conduct deterrence credibly across multiple domains and at various levels of intensity, will enhance NATO’s ability to secure its vital interests in an increasingly volatile era of global strategic competition.

Alex Alfirraz Scheers holds a diploma in Politics and History from the Open University, a bachelor’s degree in War Studies and History from King’s College London, and a master’s degree in National Security Studies from King’s College London. He has held research positions at the Henry Jackson Society and the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, and his articles have been published in the Diplomat, Times of Israel, RealClearDefense, and the Royal United Services Institute. Views expressed in this article are the author’s own. 

Deterrence and NATO’s Emerging Security Environment was originally published on Global Security Review.