1.2 KiB
| category | tags | summary | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Intelligence & Government |
|
Aide to National Security Advisor Brzezinski present at the White House situation room meeting responding to the 1979 Vela satellite nuclear test detection. |
Gerald G. Oplinger was an aide to Zbigniew Brzezinski for global issues. He had retired from the Foreign Service and worked at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before joining Brzezinski's staff. Oplinger was summoned back to an urgent meeting in the White House situation room after a VELA Satellite recorded two distinctive bright flashes of light over the South Indian Ocean on September 22, 1979, probable evidence of a nuclear explosion. He recalled that Zbigniew Brzezinski was present at the meeting, where the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency stated that the odds were at least ninety percent that it had been a nuclear explosion. Oplinger personally had no doubt that it was a nuclear event.1
Footnotes
-
Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 20. ↩︎