@pixx @khm @davep

Since you asked:

To me, as to many people, democracy is about more than just electoralism.

South Africa in 1988 was not democratic, for all that we had elections. Not only could Black, Coloured and Asian South Africans not vote, but the people who lived in the neighbouring states which we dominated could not vote. We had a small White population exercising hegemony at bayonet-point over a much larger population, both within and without the country, and the nukes were built in preparation for the day that those bayonets were insufficient. The ritual of elections doesn't change that this is fundamentally antidemocratic.

Removing our nuclear blackmail ability - for all that it was done by an extremely shady leader under extremely shady circumstances - meant that we no longer had the ability to terrorise people into obeying us. We had to build a consensus, both within the country and the world at large. That is an inherently democratic step.

Several years later, we also had elections with a wider franchise, but by then the nukes were gone. Disarmament was the last act of the fascist Apartheid regime.