Renfrew Christie, Scholar Who Helped Sabotage Apartheid Nuclear Program, Dies at 76

Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for the African National Congress helped hobble the apartheid government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76, and the cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said.

From a doctoral dissertation at the University of Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie provided research used to sabotage key facilities, including the Koeberg nuclear power station, the Arnot coal-fired station and Sasol oil-from-coal plants. He later estimated the explosions set back the program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion.

The A.N.C. called his role “in disrupting and exposing the apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act of profound revolutionary significance.” Dr. Christie was arrested by South African authorities in October 1979, three months after finishing at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement.

He was sentenced on June 6, 1980, to 10 years under the Terrorism Act; after 48 hours of torture he wrote a forced confession that he said included his recommendations to the A.N.C., which a judge read aloud in court. Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by A.N.C.

Key Topics

World, Renfrew Christie, Koeberg Power Station, African National Congress, Umkhonto We Sizwe, Sasol