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.

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"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 truth is emerging four decades after the fact: the Carter administration, Foreign Policy reported this weekend, based on new analysis of declassified government documents.The report strongly suggests the administration was worried about Carter's reelection 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 Carter wrote in his diary of the September 22, 1979 event:according to the report Problem was thatthe United States would have toto the Nuclear Non-Proliferation TreatySo 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:the panel concluded in May 1980.And yet, the internal documentary record said otherwise, as indicated by President Carter's own hand 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."From there it became an entrenched lie., despite its public stance to the world that it is not.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.the report concluded