Vela incident
[11][12] United States Air Force (USAF) surveillance aircraft flew 25 sorties over that area of the Indian Ocean from 22 September to 29 October 1979 to carry out atmospheric sampling.
[14][15] The Arecibo Observatory, in Puerto Rico, detected an anomalous ionospheric wave during the morning of 22 September 1979, which moved from the southeast to the northwest, an event that had not been observed previously.
[16] After the event was made public, the United States Department of Defense (DOD) clarified that it was either a bomb blast or a combination of natural phenomena, such as lightning, a meteor, or a glint from the Sun.
[17] The initial assessment by the United States National Security Council (NSC), with technical support from the Naval Research Laboratory,[18] in October 1979 was that the American intelligence community had "high confidence" that the event was a low-yield nuclear explosion, although no radioactive debris had been detected and there were "no corroborating seismic or hydro-acoustic data".
[20] The Carter Administration asked the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to convene a panel of instrumentation experts to re-examine the Vela Hotel 6911 data, and to attempt to determine whether the optical flash detected came from a nuclear test.
[22] An independent panel of scientific and engineering experts was commissioned by Frank Press, who was the Science Advisor to President Carter and the chairman of the OSTP, to evaluate the evidence and determine the likelihood that the event was a nuclear detonation.
[23] The Vela satellites had previously detected 41 atmospheric tests—by countries such as France and the People's Republic of China—each of which was subsequently confirmed by other means, including testing for radioactive fallout.
[26] The Ruina panel did not seriously consider a detailed study done by the Naval Research Laboratory concluding that the strong signals detected by three Ascension Island MILS hydrophones supported a near surface nuclear blast that could be associated with the observed double flash.
[6] In 2010, it was revealed that, on 27 February 1980, President Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary, "We have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.
"[39] Leonard Weiss, of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, writes: "The weight of the evidence that the Vela event was an Israeli nuclear test assisted by South Africa appears overwhelming.
[51] An interagency intelligence memorandum requested by the United States National Security Council and entitled "The 22 September 1979 Event" analyzed the possibility of Pakistan wanting to prove its nuclear explosive technology in secret.
It probably resulted from passage of TIROS-N through the precipitating electrons above a pre-existing auroral arc that may have brightened to an unusually high intensity from natural causes −3 min before the Vela signals. ...
Although it may be argued that the segment of the arc sampled by the TIROS-N was intensified by a SNB, we find no evidence to support this thesis or to suggest that the observation was anything but the result of natural magnetospheric processes.
[55] In February 1994, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt, a convicted Soviet spy and the commander of South Africa's Simon's Town naval base at the time, talked about the incident upon his release from prison.
A thorough public airing of the existing information could resolve the controversy.In October 1999, a white paper that was published by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee in opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty stated: There remains uncertainty about whether the South Atlantic flash in September 1979 recorded by optical sensors on the U.S. Vela satellite was a nuclear detonation and, if so, to whom it belonged.
[60] In his 2006 book On the Brink, the retired CIA clandestine service officer Tyler Drumheller wrote of his 1983–1988 tour-of-duty in South Africa: We had operational successes, most importantly regarding Pretoria's nuclear capability.
My sources collectively provided incontrovertible evidence that the apartheid government had in fact tested a nuclear bomb in the South Atlantic in 1979, and that they had developed a delivery system with assistance from the Israelis.In 2010, Jimmy Carter published his White House Diary.
[8] A December 2016 report by William Burr and Avner Cohen of George Washington University's National Security Archive and Nuclear Proliferation International History Project noted that the debate over the South Atlantic flash had shifted over the past few years, in favor of its being a man-made weapon test.
[5] The report concluded: A Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored panel of well-respected scientists concluded that a mysterious flash detected by a U.S. Vela satellite over the South Atlantic on the night of 22 September 1979 was likely a nuclear test.The newly released research and subsequent report was largely based upon recently declassified documents in files at the National Archives of Gerard C. Smith, a former Ambassador and special envoy on nuclear nonproliferation during Jimmy Carter's presidency.
The documents cited a June 1980 U.S. State Department report in which Defense Intelligence Agency Vice Director Jack Varona had said the ensuing U.S. investigation was a "white wash, due to political considerations" based on "flimsy evidence".
The data, he suggested, involved "signals... unique to nuclear shots in a maritime environment" and emanating from the area of "shallow waters between Prince Edward and Marion Islands, south-east of South Africa".
[2][3][62] A 2022 study examining readings from the NASA satellite Nimbus-7 taken 16 minutes and 44 seconds after the explosion found evidence of a trace left by the blast's shockwave in the ozone layer.
