That depends on how ruthless you you are, and are perceived to be. I could certainly see Stalin nuking a region that rebelled against the USSR if conventional forces weren’t enough; and with his record and reputation if he made the threat, he’d likely have been believed.
A regional nuke is also an effective mechanism to draw “lines in the sand” that the external powers will have to heed rather than intervene at will.
Also, from the strategic perspective, they would also expect that a single massive decapitation strike on one of the subequatorial countries would lead to it falling apart into internal chaos and rendering it unable to support the revolution or sustain a conventional war front.
The Apartheid regime was not however as bold as, say, North Korea, to brandish them loudly and use them as chips to extract concessions; I suppose mostly because contrary to Kim’s nukes, the ZA nukes would not be landing anywhere the Great Powers would particularly miss.
Actually, you’re misusing the word rational. Rationalization is the exact cause for apartheid, for the reasons you just mentioned: the white minority viewing themselves as a separate population from the other groups. The rational behind apartheid is not evil per say, its proponents viewed it as the most beneficial system for both groups.
The leaders of South Africa at the time had a clearly warped world view and extremely poor ethics, but they were not irrational.
I wouldn’t exactly call it a “weird paranoid fear”. The most politically correct might whine racism but the fact is that **any **country that undergoes a revolution is a complete and utter wildcard and they were absolutely correct to destroy their weapons preemptively!
One can imagine a scenario, though, in which a Libya-style uprising by the black population is going poorly and Botswana or Namibia (say) decides to come to the aid of the insurgents. Foreign intervention in an uprising would be much less likely if South Africa had nuclear weapons to lob around.
I wouldn’t say they were irrational in the sense that they were cuckoo crazy. I’d say they were acting rationally (if thoroughly unethically) from a set of unsound premises. As for their paranoia, I’d say it was quite justified, although them having numerous enemies & detractors stemmed more from being brutally oppressive arrogant backwards colonial shitbags than the colour of their skin 
Eh, but then Russia is huge. Is anyone *really *going to miss Volgograd Oblast ? :)South Africa is not Liechtenstein but it’s not that large either (esp. considering half of it is nigh empty).
The point I was making was less “nobody would be crazy enough to indiscriminately massacre their own people/wealth on that scale”, more “they couldn’t have done that and not felt the fallout themselves in the process”, especially if we’re talking about tossing nukes underarm at mobs of torch & pitchfork holding locals besieging Pretoria or something.
The apartheid leaders might have been missing a hinge or two, but I’m not convinced they were completely, suicidal-pactly, moustache twirlingly unhinged in the “if ve can’t haff it, nobody vill !” mold.
Yes, that seems more credible to me. But that’s what I was talking about: in that case The Bomb is a deterrent to foreign intervention in domestic matters, not to domestic unrest itself.
Well to me rational is realizing you’re a minority by your own legal definitions, and you’re not going to be able to oppress the majority forever. So lets slowly dismantle this thing, or you know go Bond villain. 