Nukes for Shale

The controversy over Iran's nuclear ambitions has sent plenty of folks scurrying back to the history books, to examine what made South Africa give up its bomb-building program. In joining the throng, though, we stumbled upon a curious factoid from the annals—an assertion, in an old (and offline) Foreign Affairs article, that South Africa initially had peaceful reasons for developing nukes:

In 1971 Minister of Mines Carl de Wet approved preliminary nuclear explosives research. These...