The_Info_Web/10 - PEOPLE/(N-S)/Frank Press.md

category	tags	summary	born	died	location	relations
Scientists & Researchers	Person Nuclear Israel	Frank Press was the presidential science adviser during the Carter administration.	1924-12-04	2020-01-29	Brooklyn, New York, USA	type with role start end fn appointed Jack P. Ruina appointed chairman of the outside panel on the September 22 Event 1979-10 1980-05-23 2

Frank Press was the presidential science adviser during the Jimmy Carter administration. He was a seismologist who had worked for years on classified nuclear detection issues and knew the VELA Satellite program well. After a VELA satellite recorded probable evidence of a nuclear explosion on September 22, 1979, Press, in Hersh's account, suggested convening an unbiased outside study to determine if it was a test. He was concerned about the political implications if it leaked that the administration had concluded there had been a nuclear explosion.¹

Press appointed the outside panel in late October 1979 and chose Jack P. Ruina, a former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, to chair it. The panel was to examine whether a nuclear explosion occurred, and it was limited to technical questions about natural causes and false alarm. In a letter of January 17, 1980 to Henry Owen and Gerard C. Smith, Press wrote that "we cannot exclude the possibility that this continuing data gathering and analysis may turn up some corroborative evidence in the future if a nuclear explosion had actually taken place."² Press described it in that letter as "the panel that I brought together at your request." Spurgeon M. Keeny, Jr. told Leonard Weiss in a 2004 interview that the idea for the outside panel was his.³

Footnotes

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

2. Press, Frank, letter to Henry Owen and Gerard Smith, "South Atlantic Event," January 17, 1980, Secret. Document 32 in Burr, William, and Avner Cohen, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 570, December 6, 2016, and the posting's note on the panel charter (Document 14). https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2016-12-06/vela-incident-south-atlantic-mystery-flash-september-1979-raised-questions-about-nuclear-test ↩︎

3. 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/ ↩︎