The nature of ongoing activities at the Russian nuclear test site on Novaya Zemlya, and the August 16, 1997, seismic event in the vicinity of the test site, are issues of continuing high concern within the US intelligence and policy communities.
In response to questions posed both inside and outside the government, Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet recently convened a panel of experts to review all of the available intelligence and technical data on the August events, its subsequent analysis, and the process associated with the dissemination of the Intelligence Community's judgments to policymakers and the Congress. Members of the panel were: Richard Kerr, former Deputy Director of Central Intelligence; Sidney Drell, a Stanford University physicist and member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board; Roger Hagengruber, vice president of Sandia National Laboratory; and Eugene Herrin, a Southern Methodist University physicist.
The panel concurred in the CIA's assessment that nuclear weapons-related experiments were conducted by the Russians at Novaya Zemlya in mid-August 1997.
During the same time frame that the weapons related experiments were being conducted, a seismic event occurred on August 16, 1997, in the Kara Sea. That seismic event was almost certainly not associated with the activities at Novaya Zemlya and was not nuclear. However, from the seismic data, experts cannot say with certainty whether the Kara Sea event was an explosion or an earthquake.
The panel indicated that these incidents -- the activity at the test site and the coincident seismic event in the Kara Sea -- demonstrate the difficulty of accurately identifying and assessing weapons experiments or tests with very low yields. In analyzing the seismic events in August 16, 1997, the Intelligence Community responded within the same timelines expected by the policy community for monitoring any possible nuclear test. These timelines are relatively short and dependent on pre-existing intelligence and rapid analysis procedures. Further, more detailed, analysis during the ensuing weeks led CIA to the conclusion that the activities at the test site and the seismic event were apparently not connected.
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