Robot Claw

On this day, 30 years ago, a then-secret US satellite named Vela detected a double flash of light coming from an area in the Indian Ocean about 2000 km southeast of Africa. The flashes were characteristic of a nuclear airbust, and the immediate theory was some country had detonated a nuclear test at the location.

The event has entered the history books as somewhat of a mystery. Immediately afterwards the US flew many sorties through the area using planes fitted with equipment to detect fallout, and nothing was detected. Questions about the accuracy of the detector on the ageing satellite seemed to be answered by the fact that an EM wave (presumably caused by the event Vela detected) was detected by a second satellite and the Arecibo radio-telescope in Peru. The wind patterns in the south Indian ocean end up in Australia, and the fact that radioactive elements were discovered in sheep and cattle thyroids within a few months of the event also suggest a nuclear blast had occured.

Speculation fell onto South Africa, or perhaps a joint South Africa / Israel test. One can imagine the machinations of the world’s spy agencies in those days, attempting to confirm or deny the theories. Various investigations and reports from within the USA to congress both supported and rejected the idea of the event being an explosion, and although many authors and even retired officials have since supported the possibility of a South African weapon test (South Africa did not – officially -have nuclear weapons in 1979) the truth of what happened in the Indian Ocean 30 years ago today remains unknown.

What I find intriguing about this is the fact that were the satellite not positioned to detect the event when it happened, it would have remained unknown.

One wonders what else various governments have gotten up to over the years unbeknownst to their neighbours on earth. After all, a nuclear explosion is a mighty difficult thing to hide, and if this was indeed one, whomever was responsible almost hid it (and even though ‘caught’, haven’t yet been found).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009 at 10:03 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.