What was the Vela incident about?

Question

On 22 September 1979, a United States Vela satellite detected a large flash occurring in the Southern Indian Ocean near the Prince Edward Islands. It was a double flash consistent with the detonation of a nuclear device, a very bright and fast flash followed by a less bright but longer lasting flash. However, no official explanation for this has ever been made. More information on this is available on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vela_Incident .

I would like to hear some opinions on this. Thanks in advance.

As a personal note, I stumbled on this when I was looking up why Bouvet Island (in the general area), an uninhabited snow-covered island in the middle of nowhere, had its own TLD. (.bv, but not in use.) It's weird what one can learn just by browsing. :-)

Answer 1

I'll put this in the category of "you learn something new every day". I have never heard of this incident. This is the type of thing that 50 years from now a government admits to. Possibly, Israel or South Africa or the USSR or even the US may have tested a nuclear device according to the wikipedia story. It is a very remote location to test something like that. I only wonder why not do it closer to home?

Answer 2

The Vela Incident (sometimes known as the South Atlantic Flash) was the possible detection of a nuclear weapon test. This detection was made by a United States Vela satellite on September 22, 1979. Much of the information about the event is still classified
Detection
The flash was detected by one of the Vela satellites developed to detect nuclear explosions. On 22 September 1979 at 00:53 GMT (around 03:53 local time, depending on the exact time zone), the Vela 6911 satellite apparently detected the characteristic double flash of an atmospheric nuclear explosion (first a very fast and very bright flash, and then a less bright and longer-lasting flash) of some two to three kilotons at 47° S 40° E near to the Prince Edward Islands, a South African dependency lying in the Indian Ocean.


Vela-5A/B Satellites in Clean Room. The two satellites are separated after launch.Vela 6911 was one of the pair launched on 23 May 1969, over ten years before the possible explosion. It was operating two years past its designed lifespan and its electromagnetic pulse (EMP) sensor had failed. It had also developed a fault in July 1972 where around half a second of its recording memory had failed. This had cleared itself in March 1978.

It is still uncertain whether the satellite's observations were accurate. Following the incident, the Carter administration summoned a panel of experts headed by Jack Ruina to consider the reliability of the Vela 6911 data. Reporting in the summer of 1980, the panel concluded that the signal "was probably not from a nuclear explosion. Although we cannot rule out that this signal was of nuclear origin". The panel proposed that the satellite was in error and had perhaps been hit by a small meteorite. The fact that the explosion was only picked up by one of the satellites seems to support the panel's assertion. United States Air Force flights in the area soon after also failed to detect any sign of radiation
Responsibility
The two primary suspects for the sources of an unexplained nuclear blast were Israel and South Africa, both of which had covert nuclear weapons programs at the time. A test by either Israel or South Africa would have been very awkward for the Carter administration. Israel was a close American ally, while the South African relationship was close but unpopular due to apartheid. Carter had worked hard on nonproliferation issues, and a vigorous response would have been required if it had been proven that either nation had conducted the test.
Subsequent developments
On 20 April 1997, the Israeli daily newspaper Ha'aretz, quoted South African Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad as confirming that the flash over the Indian Ocean was indeed from a South African nuclear test. Soon afterwards Pahad reported that he had been misquoted and that he was merely repeating the rumors that had been circulating for years.

Some related U.S. information has recently been declassified in the form of heavily redacted reports and memoranda, following applications made under Freedom of Information Act-released legislation, but nothing that provides conclusive proof over the incident one way or the other. On May 5, 2006 these documents were made available through the National Security Archive.