From: Zac Elston Elston@acavax.lynchburg.edu
WALTHAM, Mass., Feb. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- For more than 40 years, mystery has surrounded the origins of the United States' secret nuclear surveillance system, used to detect covertly the development of atomic weapons by foreign powers. Now, for the first time, light is being shed on it through a four-year investigation by two Brandeis University anthropologists and a team of technical and archival researchers. Results of the study have just been published in a book titled Spying Without Spies: Origins of America's Secret Nuclear Surveillance System (Praeger Publishing Co., Greenwood Publishing Group, 242 pgs.) The system, with its ability to detect atomic testing and related activities, is behind many of today's headlines about suspected weapons programs in countries like North Korea and Iraq, says Charles A. Ziegler, who conducted the study with Brandeis colleague David E. Jacobson.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, the two researchers and their collaborators uncovered previously classified documents that detail the early workings of one of America's most secret intelligence agencies, the Air Force Technical Applications Center (AFTAC).

Ziegler and Jacobson interviewed scientists and administrators who played key roles in creating the surveillance system, including the radio chemist who confirmed the first Russian atomic explosion in 1949 and who has substantiated the study's findings.

Recently, the General Accounting Office referred to one of facet of Ziegler and Jacobson's work in a report of one of the most notorious mysteries of UFO lore. In June 1947, strangely shaped bits of debris fell from the sky onto a ranch outside of Roswell, N.M. These were quickly scooped up and carted away by the Air Force, which explained that the debris was part of a weather balloon. For years, UFO believers have said the incident proved the government was covering up evidence of flying saucers from outer space.

In fact, said Ziegler and others, the debris was most probably associated with research on Air Force high altitude balloons, intended for use as part of the program to listen for distant sound waves that might indicate a nuclear explosion.

Even the existence of AFTAC, which monitors nuclear activity around the globe, was not acknowledged by the government until the late 1950s, said Ziegler. In 1988 the U.S. government issued a brief description of AFTAC. The agency now employs 2,500 people and has 32 field stations, two satellite systems, high-altitude aircraft and listening posts around the world, according to the researchers.

"For almost 50 years the U.S. has had an enormously elaborate system for detecting not only nuclear explosions, but also uranium mining, fuel processing and reactors," said Ziegler, adjunct professor of anthropology at Brandeis. "Detecting the Russian bomb was the first great triumph of that system."

The level of detail mastered by the monitoring program was phenomenal, said Ziegler. "We are able to tell the yield of the bomb, construction details, even that it was exploded on a steel tower."