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10 - PEOPLE/(A-G)/Harold M. Agnew.md
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@ -5,14 +5,24 @@ tags:
- Nuclear
- Physicist
- Israel
summary: "American physicist and Los Alamos director (1970-1979) who served on the Nuclear Intelligence Panel and criticized suppression of the VELA Satellite findings."
summary: "American physicist and Los Alamos director (1970-1979) who reviewed the Vela data in October 1979 and, in Hersh's account, served on the Nuclear Intelligence Panel."
born: 1921-03-28
died: 2013-09-29
location: "Denver, Colorado"
relations:
- type: investigated
with: "[[VELA Satellite]]"
role: "member of the outside panel review of the Vela data"
start: 1979-10-10
end: 1979-10-10
fn: 1
---
Harold M. Agnew was an American physicist and director of the [[Los Alamos]] laboratory from 1970 to 1979. He was a member of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), a highly classified nuclear intelligence group in the U.S. government. Agnew and other NIP members were dismayed by the extent of [[White House]] interference in the investigation of the 1979 [[VELA Satellite]] sighting, which they concluded was a low-yield nuclear weapon detonation. Agnew famously stated, "If it looks like a duck, it's got to be a duck," in reference to the event, but noted that this was "not an answer [[Jimmy Carter|Carter]] liked."[^1]
Harold M. Agnew was an American physicist and director of the [[Los Alamos]] laboratory from 1970 to 1979. On October 10, 1979, Ross E. Cowey of the State Department's Office of Intelligence and Research summarized the judgments of three scientists, working under the auspices of an outside panel convened to consider the event: Agnew, [[Richard Garwin]] and [[Stephen Lukasik]] (William Burr and Avner Cohen describe the review as CIA-sponsored). They concluded that the signals "were consistent with detection of a nuclear explosion in the atmosphere," and noted that the 1.5 to 2 kiloton yield was probably lower than the design yield. On October 18 Garwin wrote to Agnew and Lukasik that he would "bet 2 to 1 in favor of the hypothesis."[^1]
[[Seymour Hersh]] wrote that Agnew was a member of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP), a highly classified nuclear intelligence group in the U.S. government, and that Agnew and other NIP members were dismayed by the extent of [[White House]] interference in the investigation of the 1979 [[VELA Satellite]] sighting, which they concluded was a low-yield nuclear weapon detonation. Hersh quoted Agnew as stating, "If it looks like a duck, it's got to be a duck," in reference to the event, but noting that this was "not an answer [[Jimmy Carter|Carter]] liked."[^2]
### Footnotes
[^1]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 20.
[^1]: Cowey, Ross E., memorandum for the files, October 10, 1979, Secret. Document 10 in Burr, William, and Avner Cohen, "The Vela Incident: South Atlantic Mystery Flash in September 1979 Raised Questions about Nuclear Test," National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 570, December 6, 2016. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-12-06/vela-incident-south-atlantic-mystery-flash-september-1979-raised-questions-about-nuclear-test
[^2]: Hersh, Seymour M. *The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy*. Random House, 1991. Chapter 20.