( CNN ) -- In February 1990 , the same month that Nelson Mandela , also known as Madiba , walked free after 27 years behind bars , South Africa 's then-President , Frederik Willem de Klerk , issued written instructions to dismantle the nation 's atomic arsenal . Like Madiba 's achingly long incarceration , the apartheid regime 's development of these most abominable weapons , though never officially acknowledged , had become an intolerable blight on South Africa 's image abroad . Divesting ourselves of the bomb was -- as de Klerk later remarked -- an essential part of our transition from a pariah state to an accepted member of the family of nations . In his time as president , from 1994 to 1999 , Madiba frequently implored the remaining nuclear powers to follow South Africa 's lead in relinquishing nuclear weapons . All of humanity would be better off , he reasoned , if we lived free from the threat of a nuclear conflagration , the effects of which would be catastrophic . Addressing the U.N. General Assembly in 1998 , he said : `` We must ask the question , which might sound naive to those who have elaborated sophisticated arguments to justify their refusal to eliminate these terrible and terrifying weapons of mass destruction -- why do they need them anyway ? '' Despite Madiba 's undisputed moral authority and unmatched powers of persuasion , his cri de coeur for disarmament went unheeded in his lifetime . South Africa , to this day , remains the only nation to have built nuclear weapons and then done away with them altogether . Nine nations still cling firmly to these ghastly instruments of terror , believing , paradoxically , that by threatening to obliterate others they are maintaining the peace . Quite unaccountably , all are squandering precious resources , human and material , on programs to modernize and upgrade their arsenals -- an egregious theft from the world 's poor . Madiba attributed the lack of progress in achieving total nuclear disarmament to `` Cold War inertia and an attachment to the use of the threat of brute force to assert the primacy of some states over others . '' To his mind , the struggle against the bomb was intertwined , inextricably , with the struggles to end racism and colonialism . He abhorred the double standard , deeply entrenched in today 's international order , whereby certain nations claim a `` right '' to possess nuclear arms -- in the hundreds , even the thousands -- while simultaneously condemning , and feigning moral outrage towards , those who dare pursue the same . We must vociferously challenge the perceived entitlement of a select few nations to possess the bomb . As Ban Ki-moon , the U.N. Secretary-General , put it succinctly in January of last year : `` There are no right hands for wrong weapons . '' But how do we uproot the discriminatory order ? How do we end the minority rule ? In our decades-long fight against apartheid in South Africa , we depended upon the combination of an irrepressible domestic groundswell of popular opposition to the regime and intense and sustained pressure from the international community . The same combination is needed now in the movement to abolish nuclear weapons . This week , in the Mexican state of Nayarit , ministers and diplomats from three-quarters of all nations -- those not coming include the Permanent Five members of the U.N. Security Council , the U.S. , UK , France , Russia and China -- are gathered to discuss the devastating humanitarian impact of nuclear detonations . This will cover the inability of emergency workers to provide relief to the wounded ; the widespread dispersal of radiation ; the lofting of millions of tonnes of soot from firestorms high into the upper troposphere ; the collapse of global agriculture from lack of sunlight and rainfall ; the onset of famine and disease on a scale never before witnessed . This conference is not only a much-needed reminder of what nuclear weapons do to humans beings -- something seldom mentioned in arms control discussions -- but also a vital chance for the international community to chart a new course . It is high time for the nuclear-free nations of the world , constituting the overwhelming majority , to work together to exert their extraordinary collective influence . Without delay , they should embark on a process to negotiate a global treaty banning the use , manufacture and possession of nuclear weapons -- whether or not the nuclear-armed nations are prepared to join them . Why should these weapons , whose effects are the most grievous of all , remain the only weapons of mass destruction not expressly prohibited under international law ? By stigmatizing the bomb -- as well as those who possess it -- we can build tremendous pressure for disarmament . As Madiba understood well , a world freed of nuclear arms will be a freer world for all . The views expressed in this commentary are solely those of Desmond Tutu .
The month Mandela left prison , South Africa 's president ordered its atomic arsenal dismantled . Desmond Tutu says nuclear weapons -- like apartheid -- were a blight on S. Africa 's image . As president , Mandela implored the remaining nuclear powers to also give up their weapons . Tutu says nuclear weapons and those who hold them should be stigmatized .