The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(H-M)/Donald M. Kerr.md

aliases	category	tags	summary	relations
Donald M. Kerr, Jr.	Intelligence & Government	Person Stargate Nuclear Israel	Acting director of defense programs at the Department of Energy, identified by Hersh, Richelson and Weiss as head of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel review of the 1979 Vela satellite flash.	type with role start end fn investigated VELA Satellite identified by Richelson and Weiss as head of the Nuclear Intelligence Panel review of the event 1980-02-11 1980-02-14 1

Donald M. Kerr, Jr. served in the Jimmy Carter administration as acting director of the defense programs at the Department of Energy, making him responsible for America's nuclear bombs. Seymour Hersh, Jeffrey Richelson and Leonard Weiss identify him as the head of the secret Nuclear Intelligence Panel (NIP) review of the 1979 VELA Satellite sighting.¹² The panel met on February 11 to 13, 1980. Its February 14, 1980 memorandum to the director of central intelligence states that the attached summary of panel views "was prepared by the Panel Chairman, Mr. Louis H. Roddis, Jr."¹ Hersh wrote that Kerr said, "We had no doubt it was a bomb," and that Kerr believed the Jack P. Ruina panel's mandate was driven by politics "to find a different explanation."³

Sun Streak

Donald M. Kerr was the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He was a member of the new science panel for the Stargate Project program, which was established on January 31, 1986⁴.

Footnotes

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1. Joint Atomic Energy Intelligence Committee, memorandum for the Director of Central Intelligence, "Judgments of the DCI's Nuclear Intelligence Panel on the 22 September 1979 Event," February 14, 1980, Secret. Document 6 in Richelson, Jeffrey T., ed., "The Vela Incident: Nuclear Test or Meteoroid?" National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 190, May 5, 2006, whose narrative names Kerr as chairman. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB190/06.pdf ↩︎

2. Weiss, Leonard. "Flash from the Past: Why an Apparent Israeli Nuclear Test in 1979 Matters Today." Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 8, 2015. https://thebulletin.org/2015/09/flash-from-the-past-why-an-apparent-israeli-nuclear-test-in-1979-matters-today/ ↩︎

3. Hersh, Seymour M. The Samson Option: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and American Foreign Policy. Random House, 1991. Chapter 20. ↩︎

4. Jacobsen, Annie. Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis. Little, Brown and Company, 2017. ↩︎