The Vela Incident - The thorn in Jimmy Carter's side

After waking up yesterday to read about Dhimmy Carter telling The Times of London that Israel has 150 nuclear devices (see my post from yesterday), I decided to read up on some of the public domain information on Israel's alleged nuclear arsenal.

I now think I understand why ol' Jimmy has such a bee in his bonnet over Israel's nuclear program.

While reading through the various revelations made by Mordechai Vanunu (an Israeli worker at Israel's Dimona nuclear facility who went to the British media with a lot of damaging inside information), I came across a reference to an event I had never heard of before; The Vela Incident.

Vela was the name of the satellites the U.S. launched during the 1960s to detect nuclear detonations anywhere in the world.  The U.S. was  the driving force behind non-proliferation, and as president, Jimmy was the non-proliferation sheriff!  Vela was his array of deputies that told him if anyone was making trouble... and one day, trouble there was. 

During his watch as president (on September 22nd 1979, to be exact), one of the older Vela satellites detected a signature double flash of a nuclear detonation from a remote area of the southern Indian or Atlantic Ocean.  This double flash - one very fast and bright and a second longer and less bright - is almost always an indication of an atmospheric nuclear detonation.

Since only one of the Vela satellites detected the flashes and there was much debate over whether it was, in fact, a detonation, President Carter set up a panel to look into the matter.  Jimmy was not happy about the possibility of someone conducting a nuclear test without the US's knowledge and approval... and by gum, he was going to get to the bottom of it.

The only problem was that the more information came to light, the less clear it was to Jimmy what, if anything, had happened.  The satellite was past it's life expectancy and no other satellite had spotted the event. Not only that, 25 planes sent by the U.S. to the area to check for radioactivity found nothing. 

Yet U.S. Navy hydrophones picked up a signal which was consistent with a small nuclear explosion on or slightly under the surface of the water in the area where the flash had been detected, and a radio telescope in Puerto Rico detected "an anomalous traveling ionospheric disturbance" at the same time. Another test in Western Australia conducted a few months later found increased radiation levels in the area and Australian sheep down range of the prevailing winds tested positive for an extremely short-lived iodine isotope associated with nuclear blasts.

As time has gone on, no conclusive evidence has ever come out to confirm or debunk the detonation supposedly detected by Vela in September of 1979.  The panel Carter set in motion in '79 concluded less than a year later that the event was probably not a nuclear detonation but couldn't rule it out.  But that seems odd considering that the assessment of the intelligence community immediately following the event was that it was 90% sure a detonation had occurred. 

It is worth noting that there has never been a false report  of a detonation from a Vela before or since.

Over the years some evidence has emerged that points to a possible South African nuclear test (it was, after all in their back yard) with a delivery vehicle allegedly provided by Israel.

In 2006, a retired CIA officer named Tyler Drumheller wrote the following about his 1983-1988 tour of duty in South Africa (in his book 'On the Brink'):

"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."

This would be just the sort of thing that would stick in Jimmy Carter's arrogant craw.  The idea that South Africa (a pariah state at the time) and Israel (considered by Carter to be a trouble-maker) could pull off a secret nuclear test and conspire to conceal it from the omniscient United States of America must have been quite a blow to his already damaged self-esteem once he'd left office in disgrace.

So it's no wonder (to me, anyway) that all these years later Carter would still be sore, and would absolutely delight in trying to take away Israel's nuclear opacity.

Note:  Much of the information for this post came (and/or was paraphrased) from here, here and here.  If you have some time they make excellent reading.