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From: mitel!Software!grayt@uunet.UU.NET (Tom Gray)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: South African Nuclear weapons (was Re: New to the net, so be nice)
Message-ID: <1991Feb4.063509.20280@cbnews.att.com>
Date: 4 Feb 91 06:35:09 GMT
References: <1991Jan24.042247.24259@cbnews.att.com> <1991Jan27.113158.29861@cbnews.att.com>
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From: mitel!Software!grayt@uunet.UU.NET (Tom Gray)

>
>
>From: bxr307@csc.anu.edu.au
>In article <1991Jan24.042247.24259@cbnews.att.com>, mhr@cs.aber.ac.uk writes:
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 	The question is, does South Africa have nuclear 
>> weapons? If I remember there was a mysterious flash seen by
>> an American satellite over the Indian Ocean in the early 1980s
>>  was this infact a meteor, or a test.
>> 
>> 	Any details etc would be appreciated.
>

This may be a different occurance but I can remember President Carter
announcing a SA nuclear test. This test was detected by a gamma ray
detector aboard a satellite. This detector had a 180 degree ambiguity.
The gamma rays may have come from a point in the South Atlantic or
from a point in the constellation Vela. An article in the Scientific
American used the gamma ray occurance as evidence of a Gamma Ray
Burster in Vela. It cast doubt on the nuclear test model of the
incident.

The theory given in the Scintific American article is that a Gamma
Ray Burster is a neutron star surrounded by a ring of accreting
matter. Occasionaly a blob of this matter will be perturbed from 
the accretion ring and fall onto the star. The energy released by
the impact of this material will be emitted as a burst of
gamma rays.
,
,