ABSTRACT This article focuses on apartheid South Africa’s nuclear sector and the regime’s attempts to cooperate with overseas energy companies to provide financial investments and crucial technologies. It highlights the connectedness of the South Africans in the global nuclear marketplace and their ability to secure technical support from Western states during the Cold War between 1953 and 1976. The article analyses the parallel negotiations with French and German firms to engage with the regime in sharing of sensitive knowledge and bargaining lucrative contracts. Using newly discovered archival records it is shown that French-German competition was at a boiling point at least twice in the 1970s. Moreover, the regime in Pretoria managed to garner enough support in the nuclear field to further the growth of its domestic industry, ultimately being capable of enriching uranium and obtaining a turnkey nuclear power reactor. The white minority government in Pretoria however failed to position itself as an important uranium supplier on a global scale, because of sanctions targeting domestic racial apartheid policies and a more robust international non-proliferation regime towards the 1980s.