If you want to see what a real conspiracy would look like, I invite you to look at this page: The 1979 VELA 6911 Incident.
To sum it up, One of the US detection satellites detented a double-flash off the coast of the Prince Edward Islands in the south Atlantic. The official panel to investigate it, set up by President Carter, said that the flash was from a meteoroid, because of a discrepancy in the bhangmeter readings on the satellite. Despite the conclusion by carter's Ad hoc presidential panel, the Central Intelligent Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, Los Alamos Lational Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratory all agreed that the incident was a nuclear detonation. However, that same discrepancy was also seen in confirmed nuclear tests.
In addition to the bhangmeter readings, the US Navy's network of underwater microphones detected shockwave travelling through the water from the save area at the same time as the incident. That year, a professor in Australia reported increased amounts of iodine-131, a product of Uranium fission, in sheep thyroids in Western Australia.
Despite all that evidence, which both Carter's Ad Hoc panel and the intelligence community and the DOE had access to, the offical panel set up by Jimmy Carter said that it was a meteoroid hitting the satellite. This could have been the Carter administration covering up a nuclear test, but nobody really knows or cares.
It is infinitely more likely, however, that this is simply a case of shoddy research on the par of the Ad Hoc panelt.