Costa Rica The only recent candidate for having performed an act of complete disarmament is
Costa Rica, which unilaterally disarmed and
demilitarized itself in 1948, writing its non-military status into its constitution in 1949. In a public ceremony to mark the occasion, the existing Commander-in-Chief handed the keys to Army HQ to the Minister of Education, for use as a school. Since that time, Costa Rica has been briefly invaded once, by
Nicaragua, but has maintained its territorial integrity.
United States Although former
US President Richard Nixon expressly denounced unilateral disarmament in 1969, Nixon's unilateral discontinuation of biological weapons development in 1972 is often characterized as a "unilateral disarmament". In 2017, George Ingram criticized the weakening of development budgets and other diplomatic efforts that can help avoid or end conflicts as a unilateral disarmament of a useful tool to advance US interests. In 2025,
Joel Simon writing in the
Columbia Journalism Review called the dismantling of the
United States Agency for Global Media a unilateral disarmament in the global
information war.
South Africa South Africa voluntarily gave up its
nuclear weapons programme after the end of
apartheid.
Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine inherited nuclear weapons from the
Soviet Union that were deployed in their territories. The three countries voluntarily gave up the weapons in 1996 after the
Russian Federation, the
United Kingdom and the
United States assured these three countries that they will not threaten or use military force or economic coercion against them through the
Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances. Russia broke the assurance by
annexing Crimea from Ukraine in 2014 and launching a
full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. ==References==