Vela Incident

From the introduction: > Today, most independent researchers believe that the 1979 [Vela Incident] flash was caused by a nuclear explosion — perhaps an undeclared nuclear test carried out by South Africa and Israel.

Key sensor involved in detection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter. Gotta love engineering humor.

Wikipedia sez: "Sasha Polakow-Suransky writes that, in 1979, South Africa was not yet advanced enough to test a nuclear device: "By the first week of October, the State Department had realized that South Africa was probably not the guilty party; Israel was a more likely candidate."[46]" Weird then that there are a bunch of contemporary State Department memos stating the exact opposite. Apologies for ALL CAPS but I don't feel like retyping all of these: -…

1979 was also the year Rhodesia ceased to exist as a country. A decade before that, to the west in Namibia, Peter Thiel would attend boarding school while his father supervised the extraction of Uranium from the enormous Rössing Mine for SA's covert nuclear weapons program. I also want to point out that South Africa is a significant country in the history of computing. Chris Pinkham would spend 4 years their building AWS (albeit on US-hosted machines). I have never…