The nuclear weapon test in 1979 that remains a mystery
This may sound like an obvious thing to say, at a time when the news seems to predict an oncoming nuclear apocalypse every single day, but international incidents are incredibly easy to cause.
There is vanishingly little that countries can do in secret from each other without it being taken as an outright act of war. Clearly, this doesn’t mean that countries don’t do secretive stuff all the time, but they do so with the knowledge that if anyone hears about it, heads will roll. The GDP of small countries is put into making sure that the covert actions of these countries remain covert, and this goes for stuff that would otherwise be completely unignorable as well.
Things like an event that’s gone down in history as The Vela Incident. A little after midnight on September 22nd, 1979, the American Vela satellite OPS 6911 (also known as Vela 10 and Vela 5B) detected a brief flash from an island in the Indian Ocean. Then, it picked up another one in quick succession, this one slightly longer than the last. This was exactly what the Vela satellites were equipped to pick up, because these were no ordinary satellites.
These were in orbit for a very specific reason. They were kitted out not only with tech that could detect gamma rays, x-rays and neutrons, but a very specific piece of kit called a bhangmeter. A name as fitting as it is bleakly hilarious, this was the final piece of the puzzle that meant the Vela satellite could spot nuclear explosions from orbit. The dual flashes that it saw off the coast of South Africa had undeniably been a nuclear blast.
The scariest part of all of this was that absolutely no one was owning up to it.
Who was behind this nuclear test?
Strangely, the White House’s response was to gather a panel together, chaired by MIT professor Jack Ruina, to analyse the readings. Ruina’s panel ruled that the flashes weren’t a nuclear strike but that of a non-nuclear event hitting the islands, possibly a meteor strike or other cosmic event. In hindsight, we almost certainly know exactly what this is. A document published by the National Security Archive decades later showed the CIA’s response to the same data and put the likelihood of it being a nuclear bomb test at over 90 per cent.
This was clearly damaged control. The world was already an impossibly scary place. It was bad enough that the Russians had nuclear weapons, but even then, they let the United States know when they were testing them. This was another world power stepping well out of line, and over time, the prevailing feeling became that this was the work of Israel, with the logistical assistance of South Africa. A theory supported not only by another declassified CIA report but by President Jimmy Carter’s own diary entry five months after the event.
Carter wrote, “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 South Africa.” However, this is still completely unconfirmed and merely based on reports of the time.
There were also possibilities that other nations could have been responsible, after all, the closest islands to the one from which the double flash emanated were French territories at the time. The DIA saw reason that it could be the Soviets. India and Pakistan could have operated in waters that far south thanks to their navies as well.
Yet, to this day, we don’t know for sure. Whoever it was, it’s fair to say that they got away with it, which might be the scariest aspect of all.