Date

Oct 18, 1979

Description

On 19 October, Spurgeon Keeny forwarded a letter from Richard Garwin to Ambassador-at-Large Henry D. Owen, who worked on economic summit affairs for the Carter administration but had had a long involvement in nuclear policy issues. Looking back at the report that he had done with Agnew and Lukasik on 10 October, more than a week later Garwin wrote to his two colleagues on the panel, as well as to Keeny, suggesting that the Vela event was worth continued exploration. He maintained that "on the basis of the information which we obtained and the analysis we were able to do, I would bet 2 to 1 in favor of the hypothesis" that the Vela incident was a nuclear explosion. Those were good odds and he continued to support efforts to collect more information. Garwin, however, also had an additional suggestion: "to take somewhat longer, with a perhaps larger group of technical experts, to focus in particular on the possibility that a combination of real phenomena [natural, other than nuclear] could have produced the data presented to us." In other words, he suggested revisiting "the primary data, day by day, and not particularly at the time in question, to determine the rate of individual events which could mimic the components of the data which we saw." To try out that approach, he recommended a one- or two-day meeting by "skeptical critical experts," for which he suggested Richard Muller (University of California, Berkeley), Wolfgang Panofsky (Stanford University), Luis Alvarez (University of California, Berkeley) and Burt Richter (Stanford University).

Garwin did not say what exactly stimulated him to revisit afresh the findings of the CIA panel or what led him to propose a new review by expert scientists. Garwin's suggestion may have been the germ of the idea for the special White House panel which Carter's science adviser, Frank Press, commissioned under the direction of MIT scientist Jack Ruina. Document 31 in this collection suggests that Gerard Smith and Henry Owen made the proposal for a White House panel. More needs to be learned on this point.

Document published in following posting(s):

The Vela Incident: South Atlantic Mystery Flash in September 1979 Raised Questions about Nuclear Test

Dec 6, 2016

Spurgeon Keeny, Deputy Director, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, to Ambassador Henry Owen, "Transmittal of Letter from Richard Garwin," 19 October 1979, sending Letter from Richard Garwin to Harold M. Agnew and Stephen J. Lukasik, 18 October 1979, Secret