The Banach space E has the weakly compact approximation property (W.A.P.) if there is C < ∞ so that the identity map IE can be uniformly approximated on any weakly compact subset D ⊂ E by weakly compact operators V on E satisfying ‖V ‖ ≤ C. We show that the spaces N(`, `) of nuclear operators ` → ` have the W.A.P. for 1 < q ≤ p < ∞, but that the Hardy space H does not have the W.A.P.
