The SA government had the stance of secrecy as their official position.
It is all spelled out in Dr. Nic von Wielligh's book
The policy that was adopted was based on 3 phases:
Phase 1 : Strategic uncertainty. The same as that of Israel , nuclear weapons not denied nor acknowledged.
Phase 2 : Covert acknowledgement to some of the international big players if SA sovereignty is under threat.
Phase 3 : If the threat is not neutralized by phase 2 , the nuclear program will be exposed voluntarily , either through acknowledgement or test.
The fact that they went with the Uranium route was the logical choice. It is relatively easy , insofar as theoretically you do not even need a reactor. Enrichment via a cascade method is what you need and this is what they did. Going down the Pu route would have been much more expensive. For Pu you need to reprocess reactor Uranium waste and the recoverable Pu in that is less than 1%.
To produce bigger amounts you would have to build a much bigger reactor than the Safari-1 that was available. Even better would have been a Breeder reactor , and once you have one of those , it shows intent and the secrecy policy would be junk.
With that you would have to work the time concerns into it , and during the 80's and 90's the world was changing very fast.
It is all spelled out in Dr. Nic von Wielligh's book
The policy that was adopted was based on 3 phases:
Phase 1 : Strategic uncertainty. The same as that of Israel , nuclear weapons not denied nor acknowledged.
Phase 2 : Covert acknowledgement to some of the international big players if SA sovereignty is under threat.
Phase 3 : If the threat is not neutralized by phase 2 , the nuclear program will be exposed voluntarily , either through acknowledgement or test.
The fact that they went with the Uranium route was the logical choice. It is relatively easy , insofar as theoretically you do not even need a reactor. Enrichment via a cascade method is what you need and this is what they did. Going down the Pu route would have been much more expensive. For Pu you need to reprocess reactor Uranium waste and the recoverable Pu in that is less than 1%.
To produce bigger amounts you would have to build a much bigger reactor than the Safari-1 that was available. Even better would have been a Breeder reactor , and once you have one of those , it shows intent and the secrecy policy would be junk.
With that you would have to work the time concerns into it , and during the 80's and 90's the world was changing very fast.
