Technological development is an important component of a developing economy. In the case of South Africa, the economy is changing as the social and political order is changing now that apartheid has been eliminated and a new regime set in place. South Africa has undertaken a number of projects for technological development in order to benefit the economy, and it has extended earlier efforts with new market analyses and the creation of new products.
Before the change in regime, the government of South Africa admitted that in some areas, it was more technologically advanced than the world had known. Monitors had detected what is called a "double flash" in South Africa in 1979, and this refers to the successive explosions of light produced by the detonation of an atom bomb. The flash was noted by a U.S. surveillance satellite and was widely cited as proof of an ominous development: the South African regime had built the ultimate weapon to intimidate its own black population and to keep outside enemies at bay. A U.S. commission cast doubt on this theory in 1980, but in 1994, the South African government admitted that it had in fact built nuclear bombs, even if it denied ever having tested them. President F.W. de Klerk then disclosed that South Africa had produced six Hiroshima size atomic weapons, but he also said that the nuclear arsenal had been destroyed along with the bomb making facilities soon after he took office in 1989. Though President De Klerk claimed that South Africa had received no outside help in developing these weapons, many doubted that this could be true. De Klerk also stated that his government would give the International Atomic Energy Agency a full accounting of the program's history and the current location of all weapons grade uranium in the country and the IAEA had been monitoring South Africa's uranium processing and nuclear energy plants since mid 1991, when the De Klerk government signed the Nucle...