Israel, S Africa conducted nuclear test in 1979: Declassified documents

A new trove of declassified documents indicates that Israel and the Apartheid regime of South Africa conducted a joint nuclear test in the South Atlantic Ocean nearly four decades ago.

At the dawn of September 22, 1979, the American VELA spy satellite registered a double flash of light over the ocean, hundreds of kilometers off the coast of South Africa, that caused panic in the administration of then US President Jimmy Carter, leading to speculations that the mysterious phenomenon could be created by two prime suspects, namely South Africa and Israel.

Two months later, a special panel, assigned by the White House and composed of eight experts, launched an investigation into the incident but could not determine whether the detected signal had been the result of a “nuclear explosion” or just the “reflection of sunlight from a small meteoroid or a piece of space debris passing near the satellite.”

Later, it was alleged that US officials interfered in the panel’s deliberations and tipped the final report against the idea of a joint test by the two regimes. 

An array of inconclusive and contradictory claims regarding the mysterious flash has been offered ever since, with Washington adopting the satellite’s technical malfunction scenario and not the nuclear one.

On Thursday, however, Georgetown University's National Security Archive published declassified documents, through an article, on its website, shedding new light on the flash of light, and strongly suggesting that based on the aftereffects and intelligence gathered at the time, the incident was in fact a nuclear explosion conducted by the two regimes.  

The documents were released from the estate of Gerard Smith, a former ambassador and special envoy on nuclear nonproliferation issues in Carter’s administration. Smith, who died in 1994, was quoted in the article as saying, “I was never able to break free from the thought that [the event of September 22, 1979] was a joint operation between Israel and South Africa.”

The new documents cite a June 1980 State Department report, in which Jack Varona, then a Defense Intelligence Agency vice director, claimed that the investigation launched at the time of the incident was a “white wash, due to political considerations,” using “flimsy evidence” to arrive at a “non-nuclear” explanation.

He argued that the “weight of the evidence pointed towards a nuclear event,” particularly the hydroacoustic data analyzed by the Naval Research Laboratory.

The data involved “signals… unique to nuclear shots in a maritime environment,” and emanating from the area of “shallow waters between Prince Edward and Marion Islands, south-east of South Africa.”

Both Israel and South Africa have strongly denied the nuclear test claim since then.

Israel, which has refused to sign the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) or allow inspections of its military nuclear facilities, keeps an estimated stockpile of 200-400 nuclear warheads.

According to former US Secretary of State Colin Powell's emails leaked in September, Israel has 200 nuclear weapons “targeted on Tehran.”

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