1979 Covert Israeli Nuclear Test & radioactive fallout upon Australia

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petedavo

petedavo

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Some years ago I had some questions for Malcolm Fraser, before he passed away.
https://petedavo.wordpress.com/vela-incident/
Naively, I thought I might actually get an answer.
I had compiled years of research to get to this point. Some of which I bundled to attach to the questions.
http://web.archive.org/web/20140909091404/https://bitly.com/bundles/petedavo/f & https://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=61470
I discussed my research with the experts via twitter, some of which were quite condescending, since they have PhD's whilst I don't, which became obvious from some of their responses, yet still at least one was thankful that I discovered the repositories for a number of works, particularly Dr Lester Van Middlesworth's at the NNSA in Nevada.
Anyhow I almost fell off my chair to find a paper written by a couple of preeminent scientists, and low and behold in their notations, word for word is something I said years ago.
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/editorial/2018/05/remote_detection_of_nuclear_activities.html
So maybe it's time to revisit this event, find out if the Australian public's Health was put at risk and if anyones' health was affected.
Then establish who was responsible and ask for compensation.

We had the McClelland Royal Commission into the consequences of British Atomic testing. Maybe we should demand one into the consequences of the Vela Incident?
What do you think?
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There's something interesting about my Vela research. Part of it involved discovering Benjamin Netanyahu's former role in a spy ring called Lakam and it's role in the MILCO affair and the stealing of Urenco enrichment technology. Now @TroveAustralia is deleting these newspaper articles from their archive.

For example>
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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/15/truth-israels-secret-nuclear-arsenal

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NSWCROW said:
inb4 accused of " antisemitism "
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Can't be antisemitism, as even Israeli media often accuses the Israeli government of the time, to of been working on "an experiment in South Africa".

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news...icked-u-s-inspectors-in-dimona-dies-1.6431062

Anyhow, the only object here is to attribute responsibility for Radionuclides being rained down upon innocent Australians due to an illegal nuclear weapons test in contradiction to a Nuclear Weapons Test Ban that was in force at the time. Who did it becomes important if compensation and redress is required by the victims of the fallout.

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Christine Dodson, Staff Secretary, National Security Council, Memorandum for: The Secretary of State [and others], Subject: South Atlantic Nuclear Event, w/att: untitled discussion paper, October 22, 1979. Secret

On these two pages she mentions that this incident was discussed with the Australian Government, and that the US Government also asked for assistance from Australia.

These documents are from the NSA online archive at George Washington University

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-...t-south-atlantic-mystery-flash-september-1979
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Here's some interesting stuff from the U.S Army War College in a paper called Moving Beyond Pretense: Nuclear Power and Nonproliferation. It seems the United States has accepted the 'Vela incident' as reality. As usual I won't hyperlink a MILnet source, just copy and paste the URL to view the entire article.

apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a603163.pdf

page 6

Consider the case of Israel’s acquisition of U.S. nuclear weapons material in the 1960s. Israel promised Presidents John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon that it would not acquire nuclear weapons. When intelligence emerged that Israel had illicitly acquired U.S. weapons-grade uranium and developed nuclear arms, Nixon and, to a lesser extent, Johnson glossed over or excused it. This sad history is detailed in Victor Gilinsky’s history and backgrounder to the now famous meeting between Nixon and Golda Meir in l969.

In yet another chapter, Leonard Weiss, formerly chief of staff of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee, which had oversight of nuclear proliferation matters, details how the U.S. Government did all it could to deny the possibility that the Israelis, who ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty, conducted a nuclear test off the coast of South Africa in 1979, even though the evidence clearly suggests they did. Israel, however, was not the only country to receive such treatment. In his historical analysis, Robert Zarate of the Foreign Policy Initiative details how American policymakers either ignored or distorted proliferation intelligence on Iran’s and North Korea’s nuclear programs in order to avoid taking timely action against either state...
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I thought it was accepted fact they conducted that test? In cahoots with apartheid Saff govt?

(The real story there is the bioweapons research the Saffs and Israelis were doing jointly on germs/diseases that would only affect certain races.)
 
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2018/05/the_22_september_1979_vela_inc_1.html
Extract»
Based on documents not previously widely available, as well as recently declassified papers and letters, this article concludes that iodine-131 found in the thyroids of some Australian sheep would be consistent with them having grazed in the path of a potential radioactive fallout plume from a 22 September low-yield nuclear test in the Southern Indian Ocean. Further, several declassified letters and reports which describe aspects of still classified hydroacoustic reports and data favor the test scenario. The radionuclide and hydroacoustic data taken together with the analysis of the double-flash optical signal picked up by Vela 6911 that was described in a companion 2017 article (The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected Double-Flash) can be traced back to sources with similar spatial and temporal origins and serve as a strong indicator for a nuclear explosion being responsible for the 22 September 1979 Vela Incident.

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petedavo said:
http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/2018/05/the_22_september_1979_vela_inc_1.html
Extract»
Based on documents not previously widely available, as well as recently declassified papers and letters, this article concludes that iodine-131 found in the thyroids of some Australian sheep would be consistent with them having grazed in the path of a potential radioactive fallout plume from a 22 September low-yield nuclear test in the Southern Indian Ocean. Further, several declassified letters and reports which describe aspects of still classified hydroacoustic reports and data favor the test scenario. The radionuclide and hydroacoustic data taken together with the analysis of the double-flash optical signal picked up by Vela 6911 that was described in a companion 2017 article (The 22 September 1979 Vela Incident: The Detected Double-Flash) can be traced back to sources with similar spatial and temporal origins and serve as a strong indicator for a nuclear explosion being responsible for the 22 September 1979 Vela Incident.

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As reported in Western Australia
https://www.perthnow.com.au/news/au...lear-test-ng-56296e02ca51ffdb74f5e55514439e86
"The thyroid glands of grazing animals concentrate radioactive iodine-131 found in the fallout of nuclear tests. So, samples were regularly collected around the world for testing.

The paper highlights declassified testing of sheep from Western and South Australia shortly after the event. The results found a spike in iodine-131’s distinctive signature among slaughtered animals."

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Dr Lester VanMiddlesworth's personal collection of research notebooks and archives, generated at Univ. of Tenn. Dept. of Physiology before, during, and after his NIH Lifetime Research Grant and academic career from 1946 to 2011 are being compiled on the Department of Energy's OpenNet System.

To access much of Dr. VanMiddlesworth's original lab records use NV035* as the search term in the "SEARCH OPENNET DATABASE" field at the top of the OpenNet System website.

https://www.osti.gov/opennet/
Examples of what's in the Nevada repositories»
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail?osti-id=1001932
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/detail?osti-id=1001935

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According to this paper entitled Israel's Technology Sector South Africa had Israeli military testing facilities right up to the release of Nelson Mandela and the fall of Apartheid.

apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a513983.pdf

page 81

...In addition to an array of missile countermeasures, Israel has developed substantial offensive missile capabilities, with missiles that can deliver both conventional and unconventional weapons. Israel began to produce its Jericho series of ballistic missiles in the 1970s. This missile would serve as the delivery vehicle for Israel’s nuclear warheads. A test program for the missile series operated at a remote facility in South Africa until the early 1990s, when Israel’s close strategic cooperation with South Africa ended. Now Israel tests its missiles at the Israeli air force’s missile test range at Palmahim Air Force Base on the Israeli Mediterranean coast, where all tests are visible...
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Here's something interesting from a paper bizaarely titled The Third Temple's Holy of Holies: Israel's Nuclear Weapons.

au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/cpc-pubs/farr.htm


...The first extraction of plutonium probably occurred in late 1965. By 1966, enough plutonium was on hand to develop a weapon in time for the Six-Day War in 1967. Some type of non-nuclear test, perhaps a zero yield or implosion test, occurred on November 2, 1966. After this time, considerable collaboration between Israel and South Africa developed and continued through the 1970s and 1980s. South Africa became Israel's primary supplier of uranium for Dimona. A Center for Nonproliferation Studies report lists four separate Israel-South Africa “clandestine nuclear deals.” Three concerned yellowcake and one was tritium. Other sources of yellowcake may have included Portugal...

...A bright flash in the south Indian Ocean, observed by an American satellite on 22 September 1979, is widely believed to be a South Africa-Israel joint nuclear test. It was, according to some, the third test of a neutron bomb. The first two were hidden in clouds to fool the satellite and the third was an accident—the weather cleared. Experts differ on these possible tests. Several writers report that the scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory believed it to have been a nuclear explosion while a presidential panel decided otherwise. President Carter was just entering the Iran hostage nightmare and may have easily decided not to alter 30 years of looking the other way. The explosion was almost certainly an Israeli bomb, tested at the invitation of the South Africans. It was more advanced than the “gun type” bombs developed by the South Africans. One report claims it was a test of a nuclear artillery shell. A 1997 Israeli newspaper quoted South African deputy foreign minister, Aziz Pahad, as confirming it was an Israeli test with South African logistical support.

Controversy over possible nuclear testing continues to this day. In June 1998, a Member of the Knesset accused the government of an underground test near Eilat on May 28, 1998. Egyptian “nuclear experts” had made similar charges. The Israeli government hotly denied the claims...
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You might find this interesting.
It's about a clandestine program of harvesting bone and tissue samples for measuring strontium contamination in the environment from fallout derived from nuclear weapons testing.
It gives us the names of the go to men which the Australian government would've consulted after being contacted by Dodson as detailed previously.View attachment sr90pubrep[1].pdf
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I've come across this today>

https://www.veteranstoday.com/2018/08/15/radioactive-sheep-boost-claims-of-secret-israeli-nuke-test/

I won't be thanking Veterans Today for copy and pasting from my WordPress Blog. https://petedavo.wordpress.com/vela-incident/

I'd rather not have my words in any way associated with what appears to be a USA conspiracy theory website that is accused of racism and antisemitism.
I don't want my work being used by anyone who would use it for the nefarious purpose of stereotyping a whole ethnic group to support a particular political ideology.

I hope that they desist.

https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veterans_Today

My questions that I posted upon my blog, together with the research sources to back up why I had these questions, were directed at the former Prime Minister of Australia at the time, Malcolm Fraser, specifically as questions about what the then Australian government did to investigate the effects of the Vela event upon the health of Australians who might of been affected by radioactive fallout, and what the Australian government at the time did about it.

Theses questions still require answers IMO.

And to that end I am enlisting the help of the sleuths in bigfooty to find the answers. The Cabinet papers of the Fraser ministry, the correspondence between them and such people as Roger Melick, the Dean (Clinical) of Melbourne Medical School, the University of Melbourne or John R Moroney of the Australian Radiation Laboratory.
The questions do have answers.
There is circumstantial evidence that the then Australian government did investigate and did take actions following the Vela incident. We must know what. It is out there somewhere.

These were my original questions to Malcolm Fraser which I put to him before he died, but remain unanswered

What did happen on September 22nd, 1979?

Was it investigated by Australian Authorities independent of the Carter Administration?

Did the Australian Government know what it was?

What discussions ensued between Australia and the United States as outlined in Christine Dodson’s discussion paper of October 1979?

What did the Government of Malcolm Fraser know and what did it do about it?

Did anyone talk to Dr Roger Melick about the results of sheep thyroid samples that he sent to Dr Lester Van Middlesworth?

Was John R Moroney or anyone else at Australian Radiation Laboratory tasked to investigate and report on fallout?

Were civilian populations in Australian States subjected to radioactive fallout from a secret Nuclear Weapon Test?

Are those reports or discussions available to the public?

What was the effect on their health?

Was anything done to mitigate the risks?

Was the decision to bring in mandatory Cancer Reporting directly related to concerns about this event?

Were any measurements made of radioactive contamination of civilians, pastures, livestock, food and water resources?

Who was responsible?

Who is liable to compensate them?

How many Australians died prematurely?



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'Strayan archives are tighter than a gnat's chuff about South African nuclear incidents, let alone Israeli ones!

Here's something interesting though, sent from the U.S Embassy in Pretoria on September 26 1979 (Vela incident was Sept 22)

https://search.wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1979PRETOR08830_e.html

R 261703Z SEP 79
FM AMEMBASSY PRETORIA TO SECSTATE WASHDC 6359
INFO USMISSION USUN NEW YORK
AMEMBASSY PARIS
UNCLAS PRETORIA 08830
E.O. 12065: N/A
TAGS: PINS, SF

SUBJECT: BOTHA HINTS AT UNKNOWN MILITARY WEAPONS

PRIME MINISTER P. W. BOTHA TOLD THE CAPE NATIONAL PARTY CONGRESS SEPTEMBER 25 THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAD AND COULD PRODUCE SUFFICIENT ARMS TO COUNTER TERRORISM EFFECTIVELY.

IN REGARD TO OTHER TYPES OF WARFARE, SOUTH AFRICA'S ENEMIES "MIGHT FIND OUT WE HAVE MILITARY WEAPONS THEY DO NOT KNOW ABOUT."

BOTHA SAID HE DID NOT WANT TO SAY ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THE SUBJECT.

THE PRIME MINISTER'S REMARK PROMPTED PRESS SPECULATION ABOUT SOUTH AFRICA'S NUCLEAR CAPABILITY.

EDMONDSON

UNCLASSIFIED

NNN
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This one (cable date Nov 19, 1979) is lengthy, so I'll cut and paste a 'choice' bit;

AS REPORTED BY THOMAS O'TOOLE IN NOV 14 WASHINGTON POST ARTICLE, NEW ZEALAND FALLOUT MEASUREMENTS MAY NOW BE RELEVANT.

NEW ZEALAND DEPUTY PERMREP MARTIN SHOWED US A CABLE FROM WELLINGTON ON NOV 14 REPORTING "SLIGHTLY ELEVATED LEVELS OF RADIO ACTIVE RARE-EARTH ELEMENTS IN A SAMPLE OF RAIN WATER TAKEN BETWEEN AUG 3 AND OCT 28." TENTATIVE CONCLUSION DRAWN BY NEW ZEALAND SCIENTISTS WAS THAT SAMPLE IS INDICATIVE OF AN EXPLOSION, BUT THAT THERE WAS "NO EVIDENCE OF THE ORIGIN OF THE EXPLOSION, BUT IT WOULD HAVE BEEN SMALL, IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE, AND LATER THAN THE LAST FRENCH TEST AT MURUROA." MARTIN TOLD US, HOWEVER, THAT CONCLUSIONS ARE STILL BEING CAREFULLY STUDIED, THAT ADDITIONAL RADIONUCLIDE EVIDENCE HAS NOT YET BEEN FULLY ANALYZED AND THAT NO ACTION IS TO BE TAKEN BY NEW ZEALAND MISSIONS YET. THUS WE DO NOT YET KNOW WHEN OR WHETHER NEW ZEALAND WILL SUBMIT THIS INFORMATION TO THE SECRETARY GENERAL IN CONNECTION WITH HIS INQUIRY...
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Following on from that is this immense article

https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-...t-south-atlantic-mystery-flash-september-1979

which mentions the 'flimsy' New Zealand findings as well
 
Avner Cohen on the Samson Option

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/the-1967-six-day-war

Seymour Hersh: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal & American Foreign Policy
https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option

The Samson Option reveals many startling events that played a secret and significant role in the history of our times from the early 1960s through the Gulf War:
One of those is...
"How South Africa cooperated with Israel to create a mysterious 1979 "flash" in the South Atlantic, actually a test of an Israeli-South African nuclear artillery shell"

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