What the Vela 6911 satellite actually detected on September 22 is one of the biggest unsolved mysteries of the nuclear age, and probably will remain so as long as significant intelligence reports on the Vela flash remain classified. government officials appear more interested in preserving secrecy about the incident than shedding light on what it might have known at the time. While White House science advisers officially maintained that the double flash was a result of a technical malfunction, others in the government believed that it was a nuclear test, possibly by South Africa or more likely Israel.
UNEXPLAINED PHENOMENA IN ISRAEL SERIES
scientists and intelligence experts launched a series of investigations to determine what happened, but the results were never conclusive. national security apparatus: Had a nation really detonated a nuclear weapon, possibly in violation of the Limited Test Ban Treaty? And if so, who had done it? Or was it simply a technical malfunction, or even a reflection of a natural cosmic phenomenon? Normally characteristic of nuclear detonations, the double flash quickly set off a panic within the U.S. Vela satellite used to detect nuclear explosions spotted a double flash somewhere in the South Atlantic. On the dawn of September 22, 1979, a U.S.
William Burr is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, George Washington University, where he directs the Archive's Nuclear Documentation Project and edits its special Web page, The Nuclear Vault. Avner Cohen is a professor of nonproliferation studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey and the author of Israel and the Bomb.
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