In 1965, Why Did America Start Making Clad Coins Instead Of Solid Base Metal?

I have a question, related to an issue that came up in this recent thread that I hadn't really considered up to now.

In 1965, America replaced its circulating silver coinage with base-metal coinage (except for half dollars, which retained silver at a reduced level until 1970). These new base-metal dimes and quarters were "clad" - that is, they had a copper core, and a cupronickel outer layer on both sides.

This is all well known.

The reason why they switched from silver to base-metal is also well-known: the price of silver was going up and the solid silver coins were no longer economical to produce.

What I don't know, and can't seem to find on the Internet easily because everyone is answering those first two questions, is why the US government chose clad coins, rather than solid cupronickel coins (or some other solid alloy).

Practically every other country, when they replaced their silver coins with base-metal, used a solid, single-alloy planchet - no cladding, plating or other treatment required. Australia, Britain, New Zealand and most other Commonwealth countries used solid cupronickel as their silver substitute; so did Japan. Canada used pure nickel. European countries used a range of different alloys - but nobody else used clad. The only non-US-made clad coinage I could find, were those issued by Thailand.

Producing clad planchets is somewhat more difficult and expensive than producing solid cupronickel planchets; cladding was originally made by detonating explosives between two (or in this case, three) separate pieces of metal. The force of the explosion fuses the pieces of metal together. This all sounds overly complicated and expensive to me, especially given that the primary reason for getting rid of silver was as a cost-saving measure.

Even the new, debased-silver half dollars were clad, rather than a solid debased-silver alloy. Here the reasoning is perhaps more certain: they wanted the new debased-silver half dollars to still "look silvery", and everyone in 1965 would have known that a coin made of solid 40% silver alloy looks black and awful after even just a brief period in circulation. So they needed some way to "brighten up" the silver surface, and cladding is one viable option of doing this. But this logic does not hold for the two newly non-silver coins, the dime and quarter.

So... why use clad?

I can think of a few possible reasons:

1. America was already using a solid cupronickel coin: the nickel. They thus perceived that they couldn't use the exact same alloy for the nickel and the dime, since the nickel was still going to be larger than the dime. Historically, nickels were bigger than dimes because dimes were made of silver and nickels weren't. Having a "big coin" worth less than a "little coin", when they were made of the exact same stuff, would have seemed ridiculous. Canada has this situation right now, where their nickel is bigger than the dime, even though they're both made of the same stuff (nickel-plated-steel), but back in 1965, doing this might have been highly unpopular. Cladding thus made dimes and quarters look "more expensive" than nickels.

2. As an anti-counterfeiting measure, as noted in the thread I linked to above. Clad coinage certainly has that distinctive "striped edge" that's hard to replicate without complicated equipment. I'm not sure how often people would have "checked the edge" of their coins to see if they were genuine, though.

3. Vested interests between US politicians and DuPont, who had invented the explosive-cladding process and was keen for new government contracts. Vested interests have certainly determined US coinage policy at other times - yes, Artazn (zinc) and Crane & Co. (paper), I'm looking at you when I say that.

4. The DuPont explosion welding technique was brand new in 1965; the technology had been invented in 1962 and literally just been patented in 1964. Using it would therefore be "futuristic" and therefore cutting-edge fashionable; a way of advertising US ingenuity and technological prowess to the world.

None of these reasons individually make a lot of sense, though all together, they might add up. So, was there any discussion, either in the public sphere or in Congress, as to why they chose clad coinage over more conventional alloys?