The Vela Incident: Why Did the U.S Government Cover It Up?

On the 22nd of September 1979, two brilliant white flashes lit up the sky above the southern Indian Ocean. The flashes only lasted for a fraction of a second, but they were distinctive enough to draw the attention of two orbiting satellites, and experts all agreed that it was an indication that a nuclear bomb had been detonated. But no one knew who it had belonged to, and no country came forward to claim responsibility for it.

In the months and years that followed, the US government blamed the explosion on meteor strikes and freak lightning storms, despite mounting evidence that a significant amount of radiation had been released into the atmosphere. But why did the US cover it up, and what did it mean for the nuclear arms race as a whole?

The War of Three Worlds

First, a short history lesson is in order that is the very definition of “the past was the worst”:

On the 6th and 9th of August 1945, two atomic bombs were released over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first one, Little Boy, would end up killing between 90,000 and 166,000 people. The second one, Fat Man, ended up killing between 60,000 and 80,000 people.

It’s estimated that at least 52% of the victims either died instantly, or just minutes after the bombs hit. The rest slowly withered away in the weeks that followed, and the Western journalists who were sent to the fallen cities to report on the US’s “Great Victory” over Japan came back horrified and emotionally scarred, and explained that the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been turned into “death factories”.

The idea was that detonating those bombs was ‘for the greater good’, and that it was the best way to ensure a quick end to the war. But of course, the US and its allies had no idea what the fallout would be like. Later on, President Henry Truman reportedly claimed that after he’d heard how many people had died in the attack, he’d given orders to stop the bombing of Japan because he didn’t like the idea of killing ‘all those kids’, and –

…the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible.

In the book Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, a US Naval Officer who visited Nagasaki in September 1945 described the fallen city as follows –

A smell of death and corruption pervades the place, ranging from the ordinary carrion smell to somewhat subtler stenches with strong overtones of ammonia. The general impression, which transcends those derived from the evidence of our physical senses, is one of deadness, the absolute essence of death in the sense of finality without hope of resurrection. And all this is not localised. It’s everywhere, and nothing has escaped its touch.

In most ruined cities you can bury the dead, clean up the rubble, rebuilt the houses and have a living city again. One feels that is not so here. Like the ancient Sodom and Gomorrah, its site has been sown with salt and ‘ichabod’ [or ‘where is the glory’] is written over its gates.

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended up becoming a truly horrific FAFO moment in world history, and on top of discovering the effect that a nuclear bombing has on the population, the US realised that they’d just handed their enemy the perfect weapon to defeat them. All the Soviets needed was a nuclear bomb and a way to transport it, and they could have the US on their knees faster than you can say “Nostrovia!”

The Soviets already knew this, of course, and by the end of WWII, they were already hard at work developing their own nuclear weapons. They conducted their first successful nuclear weapon test in August 1949, and this kicked off what we now refer to as the Nuclear Arms Race. The US, the Soviets, and their allies spent the next fifty years building and developing vast stockpiles of nuclear weapons to use ‘just in case’, and the US also came up with a whole list of policies outlining what a country could and couldn’t do while building their nuclear arsenals in an attempt to level the playing field and limit the harmful effects of nuclear weapons testing on the world’s population. And most of these were in response to the verifiable effects that their own nuclear tests were having on not only their budgets, but also their citizens and the environment.

For example, the “Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty” or “Limited Test Ban Treaty” was signed on the 5th of August 1963, and –

Prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted underground.

By the time the treaty was drawn up, 269 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests had already been conducted by the US, the UK, and the Soviets, and it had taken them almost 20 years to realise that you didn’t have to drop a bomb on a city to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

It’s theorized that these tests led to a 20.6% increase in infant mortality rates in the US, and a 14.2% increase in infant mortality rates in Europe – that’s more than a million babies who all died as a result of nuclear fallout. It’s also estimated that between 1951 and 1973, up to 690,000 US citizens who lived east of the Nevada test site died because the cow’s milk they’d consumed contained traces of Iodine 130.

The Partial Ban was signed by over 100 states, which included the US, the UK, India, Pakistan, Israel, South Africa, and the Soviet Union. France and China did not sign the ban, and would continue to conduct atmospheric tests until 1980.

The Partial Ban was followed by the “Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons”, the “Outer Space Treaty”, the “Treaty of Tlatelolco”, the “Seabed Arms Control Treaty”, and the “Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty”.

In response to the Partial Ban, the US implemented Project Vela, which purpose was to basically spy on the Soviet Union’s nuclear program, and help the United States Department of Defense keep a simultaneous eye on all of the other players in the nuclear arms race.

Project Vela consisted out of two monitoring systems: Vela Uniform, which monitored underground and underwater nuclear tests by analysing seismic signals; and Vela Hotel, which used satellites to monitor atmospheric tests. It was later replaced by Vela Sierra, which could also monitor nuclear tests that were conducted in outer space.

The first pair of Vela satellites were launched a week after the Partial Ban treaty was signed, and they remained operational until 1968. They were then replaced by two Advanced Vela Satellites, which were equipped with 12 x-ray detectors and 18 Neutron and Gamma-Ray detectors. They were also equipped with two non-imaging photodiode sensors called “bhangmeters”, which are used to detect nuclear explosions in the atmosphere within a range of 3000 miles.

Within months of the first pair of satellites being launched, the US realised that the Vela program might end up having far more uses than just spying on the Soviets. The system of seismographs that they’d installed were soon being used to warn countries of impending earthquakes and tsunamis, and the satellites could monitor incoming storm systems and solar storms, and unintentionally helped scientists to discover and monitor Gamma rays.

But their most controversial discovery ever was the unexplained double flash that took place on the 22nd of September 1979.

The Vela Incident

At around midnight on the 22nd of September 1979, technicians working for the Air Force Technical Applications Center (or AFTAC) at the Patrick Airforce Base in Florida, were going through the readouts they’d received from the Vela 6911 satellite, when they noticed a “double hump” signal. Hump signals occurred when the bhangmeters on the Vela satellites picked up on particularly bright flashes, like solar flares or lightning storms, but a double hump was an indication of the tell-tale “double flash” that occurred when a nuclear bomb was detonated.

The technicians knew that when the two flashes occurred, the Vela 6911 satellite had been positioned over the southern hemisphere, and had been monitoring an area of 3000 square miles that encompassed the southern tip of Africa, the south Atlantic, the south Indian Ocean, and a part of Antarctica. They also knew that there was a storm in the area, and that the flashes hadn’t been caused by lightning.

The AFTAC technicians had already identified and confirmed the detonation of 41 nuclear explosions using the Vela satellites, so they knew what to look out for. But they hadn’t expected to see a nuclear explosion take place in the southern hemisphere – not when all of the known nuclear powers were all more than 10,000 kilometres away.

Still, they notified the Department of Defense, who immediately sprang into action to try and determine if a nuclear explosion had indeed taken place. Using data recordings that were compiled by various scientific stations whose purpose was to monitor the Soviets, the US was able to determine that if an explosion had taken place, it would have taken place between the French-owned Crozet Islands, and the Prince Edward Islands, which belonged to South Africa.

Later that same day, the US Air force sent several surveillance aircraft to monitor the area and perform atmospheric tests to see whether or not they could detect any evidence that a nuclear explosion had occurred. They reported that a storm was raging in the area and was slowly making its way east towards Australia, but this enabled them to gather samples of rainwater from the area that they could use to conduct tests. They didn’t find any nuclear debris in the rainwater, but according to a partially declassified report from the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory dated the 26th of November 1979 –

The Institute director described the rise in radioactive fallout as the kind one would expect from a small but recent atomic explosion in the atmosphere.

Based on the various sources of data that the US government had access to, they were able to determine that the nuclear bomb had a possible yield of just 3 kilotons. Little Boy, the bomb that had been used to bomb Hiroshima, had a yield of 15 kilotons, so, in comparison, the nuclear bomb that had been detonated in the southern hemisphere was tiny. What’s more, nuclear bombs were usually tested in the early hours of the day so that nuclear scientists could record the mushroom cloud and use its size to determine the yield of the bomb, but since this one occurred at around 3 am local time and was detonated in the middle of a storm, it suggested that whomever had detonated the bomb didn’t want anyone to know that they’d done it.

According to the Los Alamos report, whomever had detonated the bomb had likely decided to conduct a low-yield test because –

If the full-yield test were to be in the expected 10 to 20 [kiloton] range, the US would undoubtedly recognise the occurrence of such a test. However, if the country didn’t want its nuclear weapons capability known to the world, it could take an intermediate step to satisfy its needs while maintaining the secrecy of its success.

So now the US had to determine WHO had been responsible for conducting the test.

According to a memorandum that had been drawn up by the CIA titled “The 22 September 1979 Event”, the US reasoned that the only other capable nuclear powers who might have wanted to conduct atmospheric nuclear tests were France and China (since they had refused to sign the Partial Ban Treaty) but they had no reason to conduct tests in the southern hemisphere.

At the time, 5 other countries had been classified as “nuclear states” - Pakistan, Taiwan, India, Israel, and South Africa. The intelligence community (aka, the CIA) were fully aware that Pakistan and Taiwan didn’t have enough fissile material to make a nuclear bomb, and the only countries that might have had the capability to perform a nuclear test were Israel, India, and South Africa. However, all three of them had signed the Partial Ban Treaty, so if they had wanted to conduct an atmospheric test, they would have needed to ensure that the rest of the world didn’t find out about it, and conducting one at sea was a clever way to go about it. According to the report –

…the testing of a nuclear device at sea would not have needed to involve more than two or three ships or aircraft, including several dozen crewmen and technicians. Equipped with appropriate diagnostic instruments, they could have set up the test within a few hours, detonated the device, obtained required data within minutes after the explosion, and dispersed within another few hours.

So, the CIA had set out to determine who was responsible, and were able to point fingers to both Israel and South Africa.

According to the CIA’s memorandum, the South African Navy had issued an announcement in August 1979 that explained that between the 17th and the 23rd of September, the South African Navy were going to be conducting various ‘training exercises’, and as a result, the naval base in Simon’s Town was going to be ‘off-limits’ to the public. According to the CIA’s memorandum -

Although such a closure might not be required for a nuclear test at sea, it could have screened secretive loading or unloading operations as well as ship movements.

In addition to the closure of the naval base in Simonstown, the naval base at Saldanha Bay and their search and rescue unit was placed on high alert, and the Chief of South Africa’s Defence Force reported that he would be off touring South America around the end of September 1979. None of which is suspicious at all.

What’s more, the South African government had all but bragged about the success of the supposed test afterwards. According to the memorandum, then Prime Minister P.W Botha conducted a party meeting on the 25th of September 1979 and told his party members that –

South Africa’s enemies might find out we have military weapons they do not know about”.

He also made a speech during an anniversary dinner during which he –

…paid tribute to the South African nuclear scientists who had been engaged in secret work of a strategic nature. He reportedly said that, for security reasons, their names could not be mentioned and that they would never gain the recognition in South Africa or abroad that they deserved.

And this all led to speculation in the South African media that the South African government was busy developing nuclear weapons. Which the US government already knew about. What they hadn’t known, was just how far advanced South African’s nuclear program actually was.

Nothing To See Here!

South Africa and its nuclear ambitions had been on the US’s radar since the 1950’s. Because of its rich gold mines, South Africa had easy access to vast quantities of uranium, and in 1952, they built a full-scale uranium extraction plant with the help of both the US and the UK. By 1955, they had 16 operational uranium extraction plants, and sold their uranium to the Combined Development Agency, which was co-owned by the US and the UK.

After attending the very first United Nations conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy in 1955, South Africa developed its own nuclear research and development program, and built the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Centre with the goal of being able to build their first nuclear power plant – again with the aid of the US and the UK. They trained South Africa’s nuclear engineers, provided test reactors, weapon’s grade uranium, and taught them how to produce ‘heavy water’. But in 1958, Dr Ampie Roux, the then Head of the South African Atomic Energy Board, complained that they were too heavily reliant on the US and the UK, and that they were making it almost impossible for the South African scientists to become experts in their field because –

…some of the most important developments in the field of nuclear power, particularly in the more highly developed countries such as the US and Britain, have so many military implications that no reference would be found to them in the unclassified literature.

It took the South African Atomic Energy Board 20 years’ worth of research and development before they started building the Koeberg Nuclear Power Plant in Cape Town, and even then, they had to rely on a design by a French company called Framatome to be able to build a safe and reliable reactor that wouldn’t explode and kill everyone who lived in the Mother City.

But, as we know, every country that has claimed that they’re only going to use nuclear power to generate electricity, was lying, and South Africa had started developing their own ‘peaceful nuclear explosives’ back in 1968.

According to the book, Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program by David Albright and Andrea Stricker –

[Peaceful nuclear explosives or PNE’s] were being pursued by the United States and the Soviet Union for a variety of civil purposes, such as creating harbours, mines, mountain passes, and gas exploitation.

Thus, one motivation for South Africa’s own PNE program would have been to match, albeit on a smaller scale, work that was being done then by the major nuclear powers.

The book later goes on to explain that the South African government would later deny any and all claims that they had any interest in developing nuclear weapons, but between 1969 and 1988, the South African government was involved in 3 wars simultaneously, and they figured that nuclear weapons would act as a powerful deterrent against these wars escalating any further.

On the 26th of August 1966, South Africa became involved in a border war against the South West African People’s Organisation (or SWAPO) and the People’s Liberation Army of Namibia, in what is now known as the South African Border War. In 1972, they also became involved in the Angolan War of Independence on behalf of Portugal, who were fighting against the MPLA, UNITA, and the FNLA, who were backed by both Cuba and the Soviets.

And at the same time, the South Africans were also fighting a war on their home turf against the military wing of the ANC, who had been trained by the Chinese and the Soviets, and who regularly supplied them with weapons and bombs to use against the Apartheid Government.

So, in 1973, scientists working at the Pelindaba Nuclear Research Facility started developing ‘gun-type, implosion-type, and thermonuclear weapons’ to use – “…when facing insurmountable odds requiring an act of supreme heroism…” – and started developing their own methods for enriching uranium. The US became aware of their efforts to enrich uranium when South African scientists oh-so-casually started asking US scientists for advice, which led to the CIA keeping closer tabs on South Africa’s nuclear program.

HOWEVER, according to an article posted on the US’s National Security Archive titled “US Intelligence and the South African Bomb” –

…years after South Africa claimed that it had developed a new technique for uranium enrichment the U.S. was uncertain as to what it entailed. In addition, the documents show that in the 1980s the U.S. did not know the status of South African bomb development. They also reveal a dispute between the Director of Central Intelligence’s Non-proliferation Center and State’s INR over the likelihood that South Africa’s declaration to the International Atomic Energy Agency concerning the quantity of fissile material produced constituted an honest declaration or an act of deception.

In other words, they suspected that South Africa might be developing nuclear weapons, but they didn’t have any proof of it. That is, until 1977, when the Soviets told the US that the South Africans were busy building a nuclear test site in the Kalahari Desert. The KGB had a spy named Commodore Dieter Gerhardt who worked at the Simonstown Naval Base, and he explained that the base had supplied the Atomic Energy Board with a ‘naval barrel’ that they were going to use in the tests. The Soviets wanted the US’s assistance in stopping South Africa from developing nuclear weapons, and the US agreed.

The US then basically called South Africa to the principal’s office, and together with their allies, gave them a right talking to since they were signatories of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban. They also threatened to conduct an inspection of the Kalahari testing site, and the South African government had to scramble to hide any evidence that they’d been developing PNE’s before the American inspectors arrived.

But the heightened levels of scrutiny that they were under allegedly didn’t stop then Prime Minister PW Botha from doing everything in his power to ensure that South Africa had easy access to its very own nuclear weapons, since he was concerned that the Commies and their black allies were going to take over Southern Africa, and that the US had no interest in stepping in on behalf of South Africa’s white elites. According to the book The Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-Suransky –

Botha and his generals believed that South Africa was a primary target in Moscow’s crosshairs and faced a ‘total onslaught’ both from within and from neighbouring Marxist [and Soviet backed black] countries. Magnus Malan, now the head of the South African Defense Force, called on all white South Africans to mobilize for ‘total war’ because ‘survival concerns every citizen in South Africa directly and personally’”.

So, Botha reasoned that when South Africa inevitably found itself staring down the barrel of a Soviet gun, he needed the US and its allies to step in on their behalf and end the war before South Africa as a whole was blown to bits. According to the book Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons –

Unlike any other nuclear strategy, South Africa’s strategy envisioned no actual operational use of nuclear weapons. It was designed to be a bluff. However, the challenge was to ensure that if the strategy was exercised, South Africa was perceived as having the means to resolve to use nuclear weapons militarily. The goal was to deter aggression, not to be involved in a nuclear war that South Africa could not survive.

This plan included the following three strategies:

1. South Africa had to get their hands on at least five or six nuclear weapons to ‘keep on the shelf’.
2. Should South Africa find itself with its back against a wall, ‘the existence of the [country’s] nuclear weapons would be conveyed to Western countries (primarily the USA) in a covert manner’; and if this didn’t work,
3. An underground test will be performed to demonstrate [South Africa’s] nuclear capability, and
4. An above ground test will be performed as a final warning to South Africa’s enemies.

According to the book Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons –

An important aspect of the nuclear strategy was to maintain uncertainty about the program. Protecting uncertainty required the government to ensure that nuclear weapons activities remained secret.

Problem was, South Africa didn’t have the required industrial base to manufacture its own nuclear weapons, and they couldn’t import what they needed, because of the sanctions that had been implemented against the Apartheid Government.

As a side note – when I was in school (that’s me, the author, Emma) we were told that the UN and later the US had implemented sanctions against the Apartheid Government because Apartheid was bad. TURNS OUT, that’s not what happened. According to the book Revisiting South Africa’s Nuclear Weapons Program -

In November 1977, the UN Security Council approved unanimously a resolution to make mandatory a military arms embargo on South Africa that had been voluntary since 1963. While citing Apartheid as a reason for this action, this resolution also expressed ‘grave concern that South Africa is at the threshold of producing nuclear weapons’ and declared that all states ‘shall refrain from any cooperation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons.’

Considering that Apartheid had been a thing since 1945, and the whole world had only just found out about the Kalahari nuclear test site, it seems as if South Africa’s nuclear program was actually the real motivator. Kinda pisses me off, to be honest.

Anyway, this is where Israel came in.

In case you don’t know, Israel ‘officially’ doesn’t have any nuclear weapons. Everyone knows that they do, but they’ve been denying it since the 1960’s.

Israeli scientists had been working closely alongside the French when they developed their own nuclear bombs in the 1950’s, and according to The Counterproliferation Papers compiled by the US Army –

Israel and France were at a similar level of expertise after the war, and Israeli scientists could make significant contributions to the French effort. Progress in nuclear science and technology in France and Israel remained closely linked throughout the early fifties.

Following the Suez crisis in 1956, Israel approached France and asked for their assistance in creating nuclear weapons to use against the Soviets, and according to The Counterproliferation Papers, France helped the Israeli’s by building an underground nuclear reactor at Dimona, which Israel claimed was a ‘textile plant’. In fact, the two countries worked so closely together that experts claimed that -

…the French nuclear test in 1960 made two nuclear powers not one—such was the depth of collaboration.

In the years that followed, Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal came along pretty nicely, and by the end of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the US believed that Israel had between 10 and 20 nuclear weapons.

Now, at the time, the Israeli government and the South African government were close allies, because, as journalist Thomas Friedman put it –

Israel has too few friends in the world to be choosey about its partners in trade and arms sales.

And Dr. Ernst David Bergmann, who is considered to be the ‘Father of the [non-existent] Israeli Nuclear Program’, once gave a speech to a group of South African scientists and told them that –

Neither of us has neighbours to whom we can speak and to whom we are going to be able to speak in the near future. If we are in this position of isolation, perhaps it might be best for both countries to speak to each other.

According to the CIA’s memorandum, ‘The 22 September 1979 Event’, the US had suspected that Israel and South Africa had been sharing information regarding their individual nuclear research programs for years, and when South Africa decided to build their own nuclear weapons, they turned to Israel for assistance. According to the book The Unspoken Alliance by Sasha Polakow-Suransky –

The atomic weapons South Africa was building at the time were crude Hiroshima-style devices – which derive their power from a fission reaction alone – but Armscor was also planning a new generation of more powerful thermonuclear weapons, which rely on both fission and fusion reactions. These next-generation designs included miniaturized warheads and implosion devices…

This arrangement suited Israel perfectly, since they needed a way to test their new low-yield weapons without the US or the Soviets finding out about it, and according to the CIA –

A low-yield nuclear test conducted clandestinely at sea could have enabled them to make basic measurements of the device’s performance.

So, Israel allegedly offered to help South Africa build its own nuclear weapons, and in exchange, South Africa would help them conduct several technical weapons tests as secretly as possible. These tests were then given the name Operation Phoenix. And according to The Proliferation Papers, they succeeded, since Israel and South Africa were able to conduct at least TWO nuclear weapons tests without anyone being aware of it. The only reason why the third test was picked up by the Vela satellites, was because the storm that they were using as cover that morning was moving quicker than they’d thought it would, and the explosion was visible through the spotty cloud cover.

At least, that’s what we’ve been told. This is all just speculation and hearsay. After all, according to the US Government, none of this ever happened.

Masters of Gaslighting

In The Unspoken Alliance, Sasha Polakow-Suransky explains that when the news of the Vela Incident had first reached the White House –

…there was pandemonium. Assistant Secretary of State Hodding Carter III described the situation as ‘sheer panic’…After all, the president ‘had draped himself in the flag of non-proliferation’ according to journalist Seymor Hersh, and if he did not crack down on whoever had detonated the bomb, critics would accuse him of hypocrisy…

Just hours after news of the Vela Incident reached the White House, Allen Locke, who worked as an aide to Ambassador Gerard Smith (whose job it was to discourage countries like South Africa from developing nuclear weapons) drew up a working plan that explained how the US should approach the whole issue regarding the possibility that South Africa had indeed conducted a nuclear test.

The plan was as follows:

1. If they weren’t able to confirm that a nuclear test had occurred, no action would be taken.
2. If they were able to determine that a test had occurred, but they weren’t able to determine who’d detonated the bomb or where it occurred, they also wouldn’t have to engage with suspected parties, since they couldn’t prove anything.
3. But if they were able to confirm that South Africa had been involved, and had indeed conducted a nuclear bomb test, they had to come down hard on South Africa, since ‘quiet diplomacy’ was obviously not working anymore. The president would be required to make a speech in which he outright condemned South Africa’s actions, and the US would have to contact the UK, France, and the Soviets to decide what course of action to take.

The French are a special case because of their commercial and diplomatic exposure on the South African nuclear problem. Another special case is the UK, because of the significance of Southern African issues in current British foreign policy. A third special case is the USSR, in part because of our past reasonably cooperative relationship on the South African nuclear problem and in part because of the Soviet’s almost inevitable tendency to make maximum capital out of the episode – preferably at our expense.

The US would also have to inform the UN, which would have led to a ‘strong reaction’ by African states who would insist that the Apartheid government had to be sanctioned for their actions.

A resolution therefore, is likely to be very sweeping, calling for severing economic, commercial, and possibly diplomatic relations.

According to this proposed plan:

All of these contingencies pose issues of whether and how the U.S. should react, and if so, whether publicly or privately.

There is the likelihood, however, that our original intelligence information will leak to the public and/or to other governments. The effect might be to place the U.S. under accusation that it had information that a test had occurred but had covered it up.

YOU DON’T SAY.

The idea was to make an announcement as soon as possible to keep the media from spilling the beans. Yet the U.S government (in my opinion) dragged its feet and contacted various governments and secret science stations for additional information – including both Australia and New Zealand – that would help them to prove that no such test had taken place. So, President Carter must have felt pretty discouraged when the CIA delivered their report in December 1979 and told the U.S Government, “Sorry boys, but this definitely happened.” And the White House would probably have continued to claim ignorance if some political busybody didn’t think to score a few brownie points by talking to the press.

On the 26th of October 1979, ABC News reported that an as yet unexplained nuclear explosion had taken place in the south Atlantic on the 22nd of September, and that it wasn’t yet clear who’d been responsible for it. The White House scrambled to come up with a response, and that evening, The New York Times published an article with the heading “U.S. monitors signs of an atom explosion near South Africa”.

According to the article, the White House’s press secretary informed them that –

The United States Government has an indication suggesting the possibility that a low‐yield nuclear explosion occurred on Sept. 22 in an area of the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic including portions of the Antarctic continent, and the southern part of Africa. No corroborating evidence has been received to date. We are continuing to assess whether such an event took place.

Unfortunately for the US government, the journalists had already been informed that a test HAD taken place, that the US had known about it from the start, and that –

”… a high-ranking State Department official [had confirmed] that United States instruments had picked up evidence which would seem to suggest that South Africa had detonated a nuclear device.

Not long after, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was appointing a specialised panel – known as the Ruina Panel - to look into the incident. It was headed by MIT Professor Dr. Jack Ruina, who also used to be the Director of the Department of Defence’s Advance Research Projects Agency. According to the report –

[The Panel was appointed] to assist in determining the likelihood that the light signal recorded by a VELA satellite over the South Atlantic on September 22, 1979, was from a nuclear explosion. Specifically, the panel was asked to review all available data from both classified and unclassified sources…[,] evaluate the possibility that the signal in question was a ‘false alarm’ resulting from technical malfunction…[and] investigate the possibility that the signal recorded by our VELA satellite was of natural origin…

The Panel met a total of THREE times, during which they were briefed by technicians from AFTAC (who’d originally picked up the signal), read through the specs for the Vela satellites, were provided with thousands of examples of the different light sources the satellites have picked up and how they compare to a confirmed nuclear explosion, and read through various government agency reports that explained whether or not ‘Alert 474’, as the Vela incident was known at the time, had been caused by a nuclear explosion.

In their summary of findings (actually, conclusions, but I used to work as an auditor for one of the Big 4 companies, and ‘summary of findings’ sounds more natural to me – EMMA LORE UNLOCKED) the Ruina Panel explained that after reviewing all of the evidence, they came to the following conclusions:

1. The light signals recorded by the bhangmeters on the Vela satellites matched those of other nuclear explosions that it had observed in the past, but there were some differences that would suggest that the bomb exploded higher up in the atmosphere than any of the others had.
2. The Vela signal resembled other ‘zoo’ events (like meteor strikes, lightning, or the sun reflecting off other surfaces), and it was usually easy enough to distinguish between the two when you looked at the data leading up to the ‘hump data’ compared to known ‘zoo events’.
3. There wasn’t any notable geophysical evidence, nor any noteworthy nuclear debris to convince the panel that a nuclear explosion had taken place.

Based on the above – ‘the panel concludes that the signal was probably not from a nuclear explosion. Although we cannot rule out the possibility that this signal was of nuclear origin, the panel considers it more likely that the signal was one of the zoo events, possibly a consequence of the impact of a small meteoroid on the satellite’.

Now, this report was only delivered on the 30th of May 1980, and the findings were announced to the public shortly after, but UNFORTUNATELY for the US government, the media had already reported that South Africa had definitely conducted a weapons test. On the 21st of February 1980, CBS had reported that one of their Tel Aviv based correspondents, an American-born journalist named Dan Raviv, had heard from reliable sources in Israel that a test had taken place, and that Israel had been involved. And declassified information released post 2001 would also explain that back in 1979, Dr Ruina himself had approached the White House to let them know that an Israeli scientist who was visiting MIT at the time had been going around campus bragging about Israel’s involvement in the test. WHOOPS.

Of course, the White House kept denying these allegations. Then a report surfaced that explained that in the early hours of the 22nd of September 1979, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico had picked up an ‘anomalous’ ionospheric disturbance. In simple terms, it was as if someone had dropped a pretty large stone in a lake, and the Observatory had noticed waves coming towards them that had originated somewhere in the south Atlantic Ocean.

And then, in November 1980, a biophysicist from the University of Tennessee named Alan Berman reported that he’d been in Australia studying sheep, and wouldn’t you know, while he was looking at the organs of sheep that had been slaughtered in October 1979, he found that they had high levels of iodine-131 in their thyroids, which they could only have gotten from coming into contact with nuclear fallout. Berman was then nice enough to trace the weather patterns, and found out that when the Vela incident took place, the storm that the South Africans had allegedly been using as cover eventually ended up passing over south Australia before it dissipated. Not only that, but the weather stations at the South Pole and in Chile had picked up unusually ‘high incidences of radioactive cesium and strontium’ in the South Atlantic.

Again, the White House insisted that no nuclear explosion had taken place, and according to the book, The Unspoken Alliance –

Berman was so angry that he leaked news of his team’s findings to Science magazine, complaining that the White House had issued the Ruina report before the Naval Research Laboratory was finished analyzing its data, and then had the nerve to dismiss it.

And just like that, a Conspiracy Theory was born that still infuriates scientists today.

Why Did The U.S. Government Cover It Up?

The answer is quite simple – because of Israel.

You might remember that I’ve mentioned earlier that officially, Israel doesn’t have a nuclear weapons program. That’s because the US has allegedly been covering for them for years, and that included that one time that Israel STOLE – “about one hundred kilograms of bomb-grade uranium” – from a US Naval base that was operated by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC), in Apollo, Pennsylvania, back in 1976, and the U.S Government oh so kindly turned a blind eye and didn’t call them out on it.

And honestly, there are about a dozen other reasons why the White House has never openly admitted that the Vela Incident HAD taken place, and that Israel HAD been involved. But basically, it all comes down to this -

Carter was gearing up for a re-election campaign in which he had hoped to showcase his success in orchestrating the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David agreement and the successful Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviets in June 1979, which limited the number of nuclear weapon launchers. The possibility that Israel or South Africa had tested a nuclear weapon threatened to derail his agenda and the bureaucracy struggled to bury the story.

And so, the most obvious government coverup that I’ve ever heard about, came to be. The Vela Incident continued to frustrate scientists all the way through the 80’s and 90’s, and I’ve seen reports from 2018 from where scientists were still publishing papers to prove that the Vela incident HAD taken place. It’s like some mad scientist is repeatedly running into a room waving a new stack of papers and yelling “OH, AND ANOTHER THING!”

Since then, though, multiple representatives of the old Apartheid government have come forward back in 1994 and admitted that yes, South Africa had been involved in a nuclear test back in September 1979. Remember that KGB agent, Commodore Dieter Gerhardt? Well, he was caught out and arrested by the FBI in New York in 1983, and once he was released from prison in February 1994, he told the press that –

Although I was not directly involved in planning or carrying out the operation, I learned unofficially that the flash was produced by an Israeli-South African test, code-named Operation Phenix [sic]. The explosion was clean and was not supposed to be detected. But they were not as smart as they thought, and the weather changed—so the Americans were able to pick it up.

The US did end up imposing stricter sanctions on South Africa in the 1980’s, and again, claimed that it was because of Apartheid. Definitely not because they’d finally figured out how to build their own nuclear weapons – definitely not.

When Apartheid came to an end though, all 6 of the nuclear bombs that the Apartheid government had in its possession were decommissioned because they allegedly didn’t want the (Russian backed) ANC to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction. And knowing what we know now – smart move. The ANC would probably just have sold them to the highest bidder, or let the bombs rot away.

Most of the documentation relating to the Vela incident was already declassified back in 2001, and that includes dozens of declassified memos that show just how hard the US government worked to cover it up. I currently have about 32 of them open in my web browser, but at this point, I feel like I’d just be flogging a dead horse. That, and it’s already 22:57 pm, and I’m tired. They’re all available on the U. S’s National Security Archive if you want to take a look.

In closing: The Vela Incident did happen. It was a technical weapons test that had been conducted by both Israel and South Africa. South Africa had been in charge of arranging the logistics, and Israel provided the weapons of mass destruction. The US covered it up because President Carter wanted to save his own ass, and didn’t want to risk antagonising Israel.

It didn’t work though, since he was kicked out of the White House by Ronald Reagan in 1981 and (not to speak ill of the dead, but he) – “left office as one of the most unpopular U.S. presidents in history.”

So, consider this one DECODED.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the Vela Incident?

The Vela Incident refers to two brilliant white flashes detected by satellites on September 22, 1979, above the southern Indian Ocean, indicating a possible nuclear detonation.

What did the U.S. government initially claim caused the Vela Incident?

The U.S. government initially blamed the explosion on meteor strikes and freak lightning storms, despite evidence of radiation release.

What was the significance of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty?

The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed in 1963, prohibited all test detonations of nuclear weapons except for those conducted underground. It was a response to the harmful effects of nuclear testing on populations and the environment.

What was Project Vela?

Project Vela was a U.S. monitoring system designed to spy on the Soviet Union’s nuclear program and detect nuclear tests. It consisted of Vela Uniform for underground and underwater tests and Vela Hotel for atmospheric tests.

What was the Ruina Panel and what were its findings?

The Ruina Panel was appointed by President Jimmy Carter to investigate the Vela Incident. It concluded that the signal detected by the Vela satellite was probably not from a nuclear explosion, but it could not rule out the possibility.

What was Operation Phoenix?

Operation Phoenix was a joint nuclear weapons test conducted by Israel and South Africa. It involved South Africa helping Israel conduct technical weapons tests secretly.

Why did the U.S. government cover up the Vela Incident?

The U.S. government covered up the Vela Incident primarily to protect Israel, as Israel’s involvement in the test would have been politically damaging for President Carter, who was gearing up for re-election.

What evidence suggested that South Africa was involved in the Vela Incident?

Evidence included the South African Navy’s closure of naval bases, unusual activity by the South African Defence Force, and statements by Prime Minister P.W. Botha hinting at secret military developments.

What role did Israel play in the Vela Incident?

Israel is suspected to have provided the nuclear weapons for the test, conducted jointly with South Africa. The test was part of Operation Phoenix, aimed at keeping the nuclear capabilities of both countries secret.

What was the impact of the Vela Incident on U.S. foreign policy?

The Vela Incident complicated U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding non-proliferation efforts. The cover-up strained relations with allies and frustrated scientists who sought to confirm the nuclear test.

Sources

• Original Decoding the Unknown video: The Vela Incident: Why Did the U.S Government Cover It Up?
• Hero image source by anogh / openverse, cc0.