Jimmy Carter Turned A Blind Eye To Israeli Nuclear Test, Declassified Docs Reveal

ER Editor: Readers may also be interested in this piece by Brian Dunning for Skeptoid from 2017 titled Alert 747: The Vela Incident. Of note:

Something happened on the ocean on September 22, 1979 between South Africa and Antarctica. Some say it was a nuclear explosion; some say it was a natural event of some kind. Nobody’s known to have seen it; all we have are some remote detections, but they don’t add up very well. We also have some international politics, some government panels and coverups, some declassified documents covered in redactions, and a whole lot of data. We also have satellites and spies. This was the famous Vela Incident of 1979, also called the South Atlantic Flash. …

It all started with the Vela satellites, a fleet of twelve satellites launched from 1963 to 1970, intended to monitor compliance with the Partial Test Ban Treaty between the United States, United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union. This treaty allowed only underground nuclear testing, so the Vela satellites were built to detect any explosions either in space or in the atmosphere. Then, on September 22, 1979, about 3:00am local time, ba-boom. Vela 6911 caught the distinctive double flash of a nuclear detonation. The event was logged as Vela Alert 747.

Why Israel and South Africa? And how did Carter know this within hours? The two nations’ relationship was an interesting one. Israel wanted nuclear weapons but the international community didn’t want them to. South Africa, with its official policy of apartheid, was an international pariah; but they did have one thing that everyone wanted: uranium. What better partnership could there be? Two nations, both outcast internationally, with a common goal and the expertise and the resources. We know that South Africa did provide Israel with uranium in the 1960s and again in the 1970s. South Africa had been caught preparing a site for underground nuclear tests in 1977 by both the Soviet Union and the United States, but was compelled to shut it down to protect its contract for French nuclear reactors. Israel’s nuclear weapons capability has always been an open secret, but they’ve never been proven to have conducted a successful test.

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Jimmy Carter Turned A Blind Eye To Israeli Nuclear Test, Declassified Docs Reveal

Profile picture for user Tyler Durden TYLER DURDEN

The truth is emerging four decades after the fact: the Carter administration knew of a clandestine Israeli nuclear test in the 1970s, but turned a blind eyeForeign Policy reported this weekend, based on new analysis of declassified government documents.

The report strongly suggests the administration was worried about Carter’s re-election should the Israeli test be revealed, and also about negative impact on the Israel-Egypt peace treaty, only a year old at the time. The FP report begins dramatically:

Shortly before sunrise on Sept. 22, 1979, a U.S. surveillance satellite known as Vela 6911 recorded an unusual double flash as it orbited the earth above the South Atlantic. At Patrick Air Force Base in Florida, where it was still nighttime on Sept. 21, the staff in charge of monitoring the satellite’s transmissions saw the unmistakable pattern produced by a nuclear explosion — something U.S. satellites had detected on dozens of previous occasions in the wake of nuclear tests. The Air Force base issued an alert overnight, and President Jimmy Carter quickly called a meeting in the White House Situation Room the next day.

Nuclear test illustrative file photo.

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Carter wrote in his diary of the September 22, 1979 event: “There was an indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa – either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing,” according to the report.

Problem was that under the 1977 Glenn Amendment to the Arms Export Control Act, the United States would have to cease all arms assistance to any nation not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty should they conduct a nuclear test.

So to deflect the potential for a scandal and forced cessation of US aid to Israel’s military, the administration convened a panel of ‘experts’ and scientists whose job it was to publicly dismiss the possibility that Israel detonated a nuke. This would be the official line of the administration within the DoD: to essentially cover-up the satellite findings and to proclaim is wasn’t a nuclear flash at all detected on that day.

September 17, 1978 file photo: Egypt’s Anwar al-Sadat (L), Israel’s Menachem Begin and US President Jimmy Carter sign a peace agreement in the East Room of the White House. AFP photo

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“It is our collective judgment that the September 22 signal was probably not from a nuclear explosion,” the panel concluded in May 1980.

And yet, the internal documentary record said otherwise, as indicated by President Carter’s own hand:

“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 Africa,” the former president personally recorded in his diary on February 27, 1980.

The Foreign Policy report revealed, shockingly: “The Carter administration was so afraid to enforce the Partial Test Ban Treaty against Israel’s 1979 violation that it did what it could to erase or keep hidden evidence of its detection of a test.” Thus the hard science and evidence survived in the classified records, while the lie and cover-up attempt did also.

From there it became an entrenched lie. All future administrations would use it as a smokescreen to shield public attention from what top officials well understood — that close US ally Israel has long been a nuclear power, despite its public stance to the world that it is not.

“Subsequent administrations, Republican and Democratic alike, went along with this, and the US government still pretends it knows nothing about any Israeli nuclear weapons,” FP concluded further.

The official US government line to this day is that what was recorded by the Vela 6911 satellite was not an Israeli nuclear test. However FP’s team of scientists, academics, and former government officials and nuclear experts that analyzed the declassified record and data have offered their glaring contradiction in a foremost establishment policy magazine.

We believe, based on a great deal of documented and anecdotal evidence, that the Vela event was indeed the detection of a low-yield Israeli nuclear test,” the report concluded.

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Original article

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1 Comment on Jimmy Carter Turned A Blind Eye To Israeli Nuclear Test, Declassified Docs Reveal

  1. I think it’s about time they woke up to one if not the biggest hoax of all time. Nukes do NOT work. Never have. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were fire bombed like Tokyo. Ever since then the nuclear club has made sure the world’s population lives in fear.

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