Saturday, August 31, 2019

New York Quake Overdue (The Sixth Seal) (Rev 6:12)

New York City Is Overdue For Large Earthquake: Seismologist

http://www.gothamgazette.com/graphics/2008/09/skyesfig3_cropped.gif
Won-Young Kim, who runs the seismographic network for the Northeast at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the city is well overdue for a big earthquake.
The last big quake to hit New York City was a 5.3-magnitude tremor in 1884 that happened at sea in between Brooklyn and Sandy Hook. While no one was killed, buildings were damaged.
Kim said the city is likely to experience a big earthquake every 100 years or so.
“It can happen anytime soon,” Kim said. “We can expect it any minute, we just don’t know when and where.”
New York has never experienced a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake, which are the most dangerous. But magnitude 5 quakes could topple brick buildings and chimneys.
Seismologist John Armbruster said a magnitude 5 quake that happened now would be more devastating than the one that happened in 1884.

The Iran Horn Continues to Grow (Daniel 8)



FILE PHOTO: The Iranian flag flutters in front the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in Vienna, Austria July 10, 2019.
Iran goes further in breaching nuclear deal, IAEA report shows
Friday, August 30, 2019 11:01 a.m. EDT
By Francois Murphy
VIENNA (Reuters) – Iran has gone further in breaching its nuclear deal with world powers, increasing its stock of enriched uranium and refining it to a greater purity than allowed, the U.N. atomic agency report said on Friday.
The quarterly report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, which is policing the 2015 deal, confirms Iran is progressively backing out of the deal in retaliation for Washington’s withdrawal form the accord and renewal of sanctions that have hit Iranian oil sales.
Iran has said it will breach the deal’s limits on its nuclear activities one by one, ratcheting up pressure on parties who still hope to save it.
U.S. President Donald Trump has offered to hold talks with Iran on a broader deal but Tehran says first it must get relief from U.S. sanctions.
In July, the IAEA said Iran exceeded both a 202.8-kg limit on its enriched uranium stock and its 3.67% cap on the fissile purity to which it is allowed to refine uranium. In a verbal update on July 10, the IAEA said Iran was enriching uranium to 4.5% purity and had stockpiled 213.5 kg of enriched uranium.
Friday’s quarterly report to member states obtained by Reuters said Iran has accumulated 241.6 kg of enriched uranium and is enriching at around the same level as before, up to 4.5%.
Iran’s enriched uranium stock is still a fraction of the tonnes it possessed before the deal. Its enrichment level is also well short of the 20% it reached before the deal and the roughly 90% that is considered weapons-grade.
Its breaches have therefore not yet made much difference to the time it would need to obtain enough fissile material for a nuclear bomb if it sought one. The deal – which set nuclear restrictions in exchange for sanctions relief – extended that time to roughly a year from a few months.
LOOMING DEADLINE
Iran has threatened to take further steps by Sept. 6, such as enriching to 20% or restarting mothballed centrifuges, machines that enrich uranium.
The report also hinted at less than ideal cooperation from Iran, saying: “Ongoing interactions between the Agency and Iran … require full and timely cooperation by Iran. The Agency continues to pursue this objective with Iran.”
A senior diplomat added, however, that Iran had not changed its level of cooperation and IAEA inspectors were able to visit all the locations in the country they needed to.
The message was an encouragement to do more to help answer outstanding questions rather than provide access, he added, without elaborating. Diplomats have often said Iran has dragged its feet while stopping short of crossing the IAEA’s red lines.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Mark Heinrich and Andrew Heavens)

Russia Tests New Nuclear Missile



The Kalibr missile in action (Provider: Reuters)
Russia tests new cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads
Jasper Hamill
Friday 30 Aug 2019 11:17 am
Russia has revealed the devastating destructive power of a new cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
The Black Sea Fleet’s Vyshny Volochek, a guided missile corvette ship, carried out a test of the new ‘high precision’ Kalibr missile.
A sabre-rattling video of the test shows a Kalibr missile blasting into the air and then blowing a target resembling a ship to smithereens.
The footage suggests Kalibr is designed to be used during conflicts with other navies.
However, if it was armed with nuclear warheads it could easily wipe out a few cities from a great distance.
Kalibr has a range of about 1,200 miles.

In a statement, the Russia defence ministry said: ‘In accordance with planned naval drills of the Black Sea Fleet, the Vyshny Volochek guided missile corvette has for the first time fired high precision Kalibr missiles at a target in the Black Sea.
‘Unmanned aerial vehicles registered successfully striking the target – a large shield imitating an ‘enemy’ ship at a distance of around 40 nautical miles.’
The Russian Defence Ministry recently published a video of its new 6-tonne drone taking to the skies for its maiden flight.
Boasting that the Altius-U drone can stay up in the air ‘for up to 24 hours’, Russia says the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) will undertake a wide variety of reconnaissance missions.
For the maiden flight, the drone flew for a total of 30 minutes at an altitude of 800 metres and landed safely afterwards.
The Defense Ministry posted the video of the reconnaissance drone’s debut flight in its YouTube page. The video shows the drone speeding up along the runway of a military aerodrome and making its flight.
The video also shows the drone performing manoeuvres in the air with the non-retracted landing gear and making a landing.
‘The system is capable of accomplishing a whole range of reconnaissance assignments, employing optical, radio-technical and radar equipment and staying in the air for over 24 hours. The drone weighs about 6 tonnes,’ the ministry said in a statement.
Earlier this month, news emerged that the Russian government is working on a new stealth bomber as well.
The plane is called the PAK DA and will be tested in the coming years before being rolled out as soon as 2025, the Russian news agency TASS announced.

Thousands of Palestinians Protest Outside the Temple Walls (Revelation 11)



Palestinians protest along the Israel-Gaza border fence in the southern Gaza Strip, August 23, 2019. Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters
Thousands of Palestinians protest at border, five wounded seriously, Gaza authorities say – Palestinians – Haaretz.com
23.08.2019 | 19:18
Palestinians report 122 wounded in protests, including five from live fire, after tense week that saw three instances of rocket fire from Gaza and retaliatory Israeli strikes
Jack Khoury
Yaniv Kubovich
23.08.2019 | 19:18
One hundred and twenty-two Palestinians were wounded, including 50 by live fire, on Friday during protests at the Gaza-Israel border, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Twenty-six of the wounded were said to have been hospitalized, including five in serious condition.
Palestinian reports said that thousands of demonstrators gathered along the border fence.
This week’s protests come after after a week of tensions that saw three incidents of rocket fire from the Strip and retaliatory airstrikes carried out by the Israeli military.
The army was preparing for the possibility of escalations along the border but said it was likely that Hamas would be working to control the protests. The army has been instructed to exercise restraint in the use of live fire.
A senior member of the March of Return organizing committee said on Friday they have deployed inspectors in areas of friction to prevent people from approaching the fence.
The military’s Arabic-language spokesman warned Hamas in a Facebook post on Thursday that attacks on Israel by Islamic Jihad were endangering efforts to improve civilian life in the enclave. In his post, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee urged Gaza’s rulers to keep violence in check.
Meanwhile, the army said Thursday overnight a Palestinian who was launching grenades at Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza near Israel’s border was shot by the force. His condition remains unclear.
One hundred and twenty-two Palestinians were wounded, including 50 by live fire, on Friday during protests at the Gaza-Israel border, the Gaza Health Ministry said. Twenty-six of the wounded were said to have been hospitalized, including five in serious condition.
Palestinian reports said that thousands of demonstrators gathered along the border fence.
This week’s protests come after after a week of tensions that saw three incidents of rocket fire from the Strip and retaliatory airstrikes carried out by the Israeli military.
The army was preparing for the possibility of escalations along the border but said it was likely that Hamas would be working to control the protests. The army has been instructed to exercise restraint in the use of live fire.
A senior member of the March of Return organizing committee said on Friday they have deployed inspectors in areas of friction to prevent people from approaching the fence.
The military’s Arabic-language spokesman warned Hamas in a Facebook post on Thursday that attacks on Israel by Islamic Jihad were endangering efforts to improve civilian life in the enclave. In his post, Lt. Col. Avichay Adraee urged Gaza’s rulers to keep violence in check.
Meanwhile, the army said Thursday overnight a Palestinian who was launching grenades at Israeli soldiers in northern Gaza near Israel’s border was shot by the force. His condition remains unclear.

Israel Fires Missile Outside the Temple Walls (Revelation 11)



Israeli Air Force Fires Missile Into Northern Gaza
29 Aug
1:56 AM
Israeli army war jets fired, on Wednesday evening, several missiles into a site run by the al-Qassam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas, in northern Gaza, causing damage.
Media sources in Gaza said the missiles caused property damage but did not lead to casualties.
The targeted Palestinian site is located in an area, north of Beit Lahia, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
On its part, the Israeli army said it was retaliating to a shell, which was reportedly fired from Gaza, and landed in an open area, causing no damage or injuries.

Pakistan Tests Her Nukes (Daniel 8:8)



Pakistan tested a ballistic missile amid ongoing tensions with India
(CNN) — Pakistan announced Thursday that it had successfully tested a surface-to-surface missile with the capacity of carrying various types of warheads over distances up to 290 kilometers (180 miles).
The official Twitter account of the Pakistan Armed Forces shared a video of the training launch of the Ghaznavi missile, adding: “President & PM conveyed appreciation to team & congrats to the nation.”
In a weekly media briefing Thursday, Indian foreign ministry spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said: “We were aware of the test. As per the established CBM, we were informed about the test by Pakistan.” He was referring to the confidence building measures agreed between the nuclear-armed neighbors.
Pakistan’s last surface-to-surface missile test occurred in May, during vote counting in India’s national election.
The latest show of force comes amid ongoing tensions between Pakistan and India over the disputed region of Kashmir, over which they have repeatedly clashed since partition in 1947. In February, the countries’ militaries became locked in a standoff after India blamed Pakistan for a suicide bombing in Kashmir that killed over 40 Indian troops.

Crossroads with Israel, Iran, and Iraq



Alleged Israeli Strikes Bring US to Crossroads in Iraq
A recent series of suspected Israeli strikes inside Iraq could end the American nation-building project that began with the 2002 invasion — or show the limits of the Trump administration’s campaign to constrain Iran.
In the last month, attacks on Iran-linked weapons depots and militia convoys in Iraq — as well on targets across Syria and Lebanon — have suggested that Israel has launched a new front in its shadow war with Iran. The strikes mark the first known attacks by Israel on Iraq since 1981, though its forces have carried out hundreds of such attacks in Syria and Lebanon over the last seven years. In Baghdad, where a burgeoning nationalist faction in domestic politics has for months been pushing for the removal of U.S. troops, some groups have blamed Washington. Although it doesn’t appear that the United States provided any support to the striking forces, Israel is a close U.S. ally, and at least appears to be helping the Trump administration “push back” on Iran.
Pentagon leaders see the U.S. relationship with Iraq as a strategic berm in the troubled region, raising the question of what short-term tactical gains from a strike would be worth damaging that relationship. The Defense Department has fiercely denied carrying out the attacks. On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that he was concerned about “anything that may impact our mission, our relationship, or our forces” in Iraq.
But across the river, where the White House has made constraining Iran its top regional goal, the tone has been very different. Administration officials, speaking anonymously, have pinned the blame on Iran. On Monday, Vice President Mike Pence touted a “great conversation” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. “The United State fully supports Israel’s right to defend itself from imminent threats,” Pence tweeted. “Under President @realDonaldTrump, America will always stand with Israel!”
“Could there be backlash? Yes,” said Michael Knights, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute who specializes in the military and security affairs of Iraq and travels often to Baghdad. “It could seriously damage the U.S. coalition position inside Iraq. But the question is whether the U.S. really cares that much about being removed from Iraq.”
Why Now?
Israel has long sought to disrupt the spread of Iranian weapons to proxies who could strike Israel. Tel Aviv says  Tehran is trying to establish a land-based supply line through Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon. (Israel fought a brief war with the Iran-linked militia-and-political party in 2006.) In particular, Israel worries about long-range missiles and anti-aircraft defenses.
Israel has repeatedly demonstrated that it can find and destroy Iranian targets in Lebanon and western Syria. But the strikes in Iraq are a significant escalation, analysts say — one that likely reflects both domestic politics in Israel, maturing military capabilities, and perhaps tacit support from Washington.
“What’s very significant is that Israel has demonstrated that it has fine grain insight into the movement and operations of the Iranian proxies in Iraq, and that it has the reach to actually strike those targets successfully,” Knights said. “Clearly over the last couple years, it has been developing the technology to reach into Western and Northeastern Iraq, right up to Iranian border, and strike with great precision.”
The nature of targets themselves is also an open question that could explain the new campaign, says Behnam Ben Taleblu, an analyst at the hawkish Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. Reports that Iran had parked weapons in Iraq’s western Anbar province in 2018 “likely impacted Israel’s tolerance for risk.”
As Iran began to transfer weapons to Iran-backed militias in western Iraq, I believe the Israeli calculus began to change,” Taleblu said. “They may have realized that no matter how successful strikes in Syria are, they would only be mowing the lawn if they did not stem the source of these transfers.”
Some analysts believe that Netanyahu approved the strikes to buttress his tough-on-Iran campaign platform and help win re-election on Sept. 17. Last January, he began publicly acknowledging strikes on Iranian weapons in Syria; more recently he has hinted that Israel is responsible for the Iraq attacks.
What About Washington?
It remains an open question how much support for the strikes Washington has given Israel, if any. The Pentagon has robustly denied any involvement. Officials have noted that they lack authority over Iraqi skies, and emphasized that U.S. troops are in Iraq at the invitation of the government solely to fight ISIS.
But Trump stirred controversy in Baghdad in February when he said that he wanted to use troops stationed in Iraq to “watch Iran.”
While it is not clear that the Trump administration has done anything to encourage the Israelis, it’s equally unclear that it has sought to discourage them, either. Despite rhetoric about “pushing back” on Iran, the Trump administration has so far relied on choking sanctions and maritime patrols to box in Tehran. Most of the kinetic activity has been carried out by U.S. allies in the region like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Joint Chiefs Chairman Joseph Dunford said Wednesday that additional forces sent to the region in recent months to deter Iran “hasn’t had a material effect on the actual capacity of the Iranian forces or their proxies.”
“The Americans have the incentive to look the other way,” Taleblu said, since the strikes “accomplish a goal the U.S. wants to accomplish: rolling back Iran’s regional influence and eroding its freedom of maneuver.”
To some analysts, the uncertainty reflects an apparent divide within the Trump administration on how to handle what it has termed Iranian “malign activities” in Iraq. According to Knights, there is a growing awareness amongst Iraqi lawmakers that a U.S. presence in the country is not a foregone conclusion under the Trump administration, especially at the expense of the administration’s hardline Iran policy.
“This administration is of two minds,” Knights said. Although the Pentagon still sees Iraq as an important security partner in the region, there is part of the administration that thinks, “Iraq already lost to Iran so why are we wasting our time?” he said.
A Fraught Relationship
The Trump administration has pressed Baghdad to crack down on Iran-aligned militias that helped fight ISIS.
But those groups are deeply intertwined in the Iraqi political system. Many of them are associated with political parties represented in parliament and some of have been incorporated into the Iraqi military as so-called “Popular Mobilization Forces.” Hinting at the complexity of unraveling the militias from Iraq’s political system is the fact that the PMF groups are on the military’s payroll, which receives security assistance from the United States. Privately, Pentagon leaders often acknowledge that straining all Iranian influence from Iraq, with which it shares a border, is unlikely.
There is a simmering movement in Iraq to kick the Americans out of the country, lead by the nationalist Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. (Sadr’s faction is also opposed to Iranian influence in the country.) But Baghdad is also worried about a nascent resurgence of ISIS — a resurgence that it would likely need U.S. support to suppress — and so, at least for now, the sovereignty movement has stopped short of forcing a U.S. departure.
How long the United States will be able to look the other way while Israel continues to strike Iraq depends on how the Iraqis respond, both Taleblu and Knights said. So far, Sadr has encouraged his followers to remain focused on disarming the militias that aren’t under state control. But public opinion could shift if the strikes continue.
“The X-factor is the Iraqi response,” said Taleblu. “As Israel expands targeting into Iraq, it likely means the U.S. will have thread a needle based on how the Iraqi government wants to respond.”
Knights said he expects the crisis to “fizzle out.”
“Eventually, the U.S. is probably going to have a word with the Israelis and the Israelis will feel a bit more pressure to wind it down,” he said, suggesting they are hitting as many targets as they can now. “That’s how all of their wars have been fought: get their licks in quickly before the international community shuts down the fighting.”
The alternative, Taleblu said — that the U.S. is asked to leave Iraq — would be “devastating.”

Friday, August 30, 2019

Authorities Expecting The Sixth Seal? (Revelation 6:12)

New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS
JULY 17, 2014
Here is another reason to buy a mega-million-dollar apartment in a Manhattan high-rise: Earthquake forecast maps for New York City that a federal agency issued on Thursday indicate “a slightly lower hazard for tall buildings than previously thought.”
The agency, the United States Geodetic Survey, tempered its latest quake prediction with a big caveat.
Federal seismologists based their projections of a lower hazard for tall buildings — “but still a hazard nonetheless,” they cautioned — on a lower likelihood of slow shaking from an earthquake occurring near the city, the type of shaking that typically causes more damage to taller structures.
“The tall buildings in Manhattan are not where you should be focusing,” said John Armbruster, a seismologist with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. “They resonate with long period waves. They are designed and engineered to ride out an earthquake. Where you should really be worried in New York City is the common brownstone and apartment building and buildings that are poorly maintained.”
Mr. Armbruster was not involved in the federal forecast, but was an author of an earlier study that suggested that “a pattern of subtle but active faults makes the risk of earthquakes to the New York City area substantially greater than formerly believed.”
He noted that barely a day goes by without a New York City building’s being declared unsafe, without an earthquake. “If you had 30, 40, 50 at one time, responders would be overloaded,” he said.
The city does have an earthquake building code that went into effect in 1996, and that applies primarily to new construction.
A well-maintained building would probably survive a magnitude 5 earthquake fairly well, he said. The last magnitude 5 earthquake in the city struck in 1884. Another is not necessarily inevitable; faults are more random and move more slowly than they do in, say, California. But he said the latest federal estimate was probably raised because of the magnitude of the Virginia quake.
Mr. Armbruster said the Geodetic Survey forecast would not affect his daily lifestyle. “I live in a wood-frame building with a brick chimney and I’m not alarmed sitting up at night worried about it,” he said. “But society’s leaders need to take some responsibility.”

Escalating to the First Nuclear War (Revelation 8)



India’s defence minister Rajnath Singh (left) and Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan (right).Credit: Hindustan Times/Getty, Aamir Qureshi/Getty
India–Pakistan nuclear escalation: where could it lead?
India says its ‘no first use’ nuclear policy could change. Nature examines what that means for the country’s fraught relationship with Pakistan.
29 August 2019
NEWS EXPLAINER
Priyanka Pulla
Nuclear tensions are escalating between south Asia’s two superpowers — India and Pakistan — following the Indian defence minister’s announcement earlier this month that India may revoke its current commitment to only use nuclear weapons in retaliation for a nuclear attack, known as ‘no first use’.
Some experts watching the situation have told Nature that the risk of a conflict between the two countries has never been greater since they both tested nuclear weapons in 1998.
“It’s very explosive right now and I am really concerned it could get worse,” says Atta-ur-Rahman, professor of chemistry at the University of Karachi in Pakistan and a science adviser to Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan. Khan has talked up the risks of nuclear war between the two countries on several occasions since being elected a year ago.
Vipin Narang, who studies nuclear proliferation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, says the statement from defence minister Rajnath Singh creates ambiguity in India’s no-first-use policy, and “essentially renders it meaningless”.
Satinder Kumar Sikka, a condensed matter physicist who was part of India’s 1998 nuclear-weapons testing team, argues that India should be able to use nuclear weapons if there is an increased risk that Pakistan would do so first. “If we are threatened by Pakistan, we have every right to retaliate,” he says.
Others caution against reading too much into the present war of words, emphasizing that a conventional war or a nuclear armed conflict will not be triggered just because of strong language from both sides.
Nature examines the background for the latest escalation, what it means and what could happen next.
What is no first use and who else has adopted it?
Of the world’s eight declared nuclear-weapons states, only China and India have an unambiguous no first use nuclear weapons policy. This is a commitment only to use nuclear weapons in response to a nuclear attack and never in retaliation for one using conventional weapons. Such a policy also includes comprehensive protocols in which activating nuclear weapons would only ever be a last resort.
India tested its first nuclear weapon in 1974 and the government committed to no first use in 2003, five years after conducting a second set of nuclear-weapons tests on 11 and 13 May 1998. The intention in declaring no first use was partly to help defuse tensions with its neighbour, which had responded to India’s second test with its own nuclear tests the same month.
Over the past two decades, Pakistan has amassed 150–160 nuclear missiles, to India’s 130–140, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Both countries, moreover, have advanced nuclear weapons, as well as ballistics research and development programmes.
Why doesn’t Pakistan have a no first use policy?
According to Feroz Hassan Khan, who teaches security studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, if Pakistan were to adopt the same policy, that would negate its reason for developing nuclear weapons in the first place.
Khan, who was a member of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons planning staff in the early 2000s, says that the country began developing nuclear weapons in the 1970s because it had fewer armed forces than India and knew it would lose a conventional war unless it developed more powerful military technology. At the time, Pakistan’s then prime minister said his people would “eat grass, leaves or go hungry” if that is what it took to get nuclear weapons.
India and Pakistan have been at loggerheads before: why is the current situation such a big deal?
When India’s defence minister Singh said on 16 August that the country’s long-held no first use nuclear weapons doctrine could change, “depending on circumstances”, this was not the first time a senior politician had floated the idea.
But the minister’s statement came at a time when the two countries’ governments are barely on speaking terms. A week earlier, India announced that Kashmir — a disputed northern region claimed by both India and Pakistan and currently divided into two areas administered by each country, respectively — would no longer need a separate constitution from the rest of India. Indian-administered Kashmir would, moreover, be partitioned into two territories. A curfew and communications blackout followed in Indian-administered Kashmir, which is very slowly being lifted.
Pakistan’s government has been trying to persuade the international community through the United Nations to censure India’s government. India’s opposition parties also oppose what is happening in Kashmir. But India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, says that its changes will help Kashmiri society and its economy to develop, and that neither country needs outside help to resolve their differences.
Relations have been on a knife-edge since February, when a Pakistan-based militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammad, claimed responsibility for the deaths of 40 paramilitary police officers in Indian-administered Kashmir. India responded with air strikes that hit targets inside Pakistan. For a few days in February it did seem as if war would break out. Pakistan and India have previously fought wars with each over the region.
What might happen next?
Analysts say that a nuclear conflict — although closer — is still remote. But they also agree that rhetoric from both sides combined with the possibility of even a small change to India’s no first use principle is not safe.
For example, if India firms up the change in its no first use policy, Pakistan might take this as a signal that India could pre-emptively strike at Pakistani nuclear installations, says Narang. And that might, in turn, prompt Pakistan to use up all its nuclear weapons first. “And so, you get this destabilising dynamic where as soon as the crisis becomes nuclearized, there is an incentive for both sides to go first,” Narang says..
How likely are these scenarios?
Ramamurti Rajaraman, emeritus professor of physics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, calls the escalating rhetoric a “war of words” — that will not on its own lead to military action.
However, the increasing tensions combined with references to nuclear conflict from both sides mean that the two countries are now likely to have changed the status of their nuclear weapons readiness from “peacetime” to “crisis”, says Khan.
In practice, this means moving the three main physical components of a weapon — the warhead, missile-delivery system and fissile material core — either assembled or closer to where they need to be, ready for launch. In peacetime, each component is kept at a different location, for safety and security.
According to Khan, such a state of readiness for a strike heightens the risk of a nuclear accident, but is not in itself a sign that war will happen.
But if there is another attack inside India — as happened in February — India’s armed forces might again respond with force. That would precipitate a reaction from Pakistan’s military, prompting a retaliation from India. Unless one side voluntarily holds back, the prospect of such military escalation concerns analysts because it could eventually lead to strikes against nuclear targets.
doi: 10.1038/d41586-019-02578-5

The Cost of the Nuclear Race



The New Nuclear Arms Race Is Here. And Russia’s Already Paying the Price.
Meet 4 new nuclear weapons systems the Kremlin is testing — right now.
By Greg Walters
Aug 29 2019, 2:09pm
At the funeral for 14 Russian sailors, Captain Sergei Pavlov hailed the “blameless heroes” for dousing the fire that broke out on their nuclear spy submarine, called the Losharik, during a secret mission last month.
“At the cost of their lives,” Pavlov said, “they prevented a catastrophe on a planetary scale.”
But as Russia tests and deploys an array of exotic new nuclear weapons, fears are mounting that the next nuclear mishap may not be so easily contained.
This summer alone, Russia has suffered some two-dozen casualties in accidents related to exotic nuclear hardware, including the mysterious explosion linked to the Skyfall missile program that killed seven and sent local radiation levels spiking in a nearby city.
The deadly incidents are stoking fears of a return to Cold War-style runaway nuclear arms development, accompanied by dangerous accidents and Soviet-style cover-ups.
You can blame the renewed U.S.-Russian arms race, which nuclear experts warn is driving Russia to recklessly experiment with “absurd” new ideas.
“We need to acknowledge that the Russians are engaged in wacky programs,” said Aaron Stein, a nuclear nonproliferation expert at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. “It’s indicative of an arms complex that has been cut loose to pursue exotic, silly projects. And it’s dangerous.”
Things that go boom
The U.S. and Russia have bitterly accused each other of violating arms control obligations for decades (Putin still likes to complain about George W. Bush’s decision to ditch an anti-missile defense treaty in 2002). But even in this context, the recriminations and missile-waving have ratcheted up in recent years.
President Trump shares some of the blame. Since taking office, he’s proposed billions more in spending on nuclear programs, and began manufacturing low-yield, tactical warheads that could be deployed in a more limited way on a battlefield, a factor making them more likely to be used.
He stoked further outrage in Russia and much of the international community by officially withdrawing the U.S. from the INF Treaty, which US officials and independent experts say Russia had been violating for years.
The Cold War-era INF Treaty banned land-based short and medium-range missiles, and its demise means that both sides will likely begin developing new nuclear missiles designed to be launched much closer to their targets that was previously allowed.
Putin, for his part, has kicked things up a notch by personally unveiling several new nuclear weapons. In a massively-hyped rollout last spring, Putin boasted they’d be “invincible” to U.S. missile defense systems, and showcased a video of warheads raining down on Florida to thunderous applause from a roomful of Moscow’s ruling elite.
But while shiny new nukes may earn him love at home, ultimately Putin’s solving a problem Russia doesn’t actually have: Russia has so many missiles it could easily swamp American defenses.
“The current Russian strategic arsenal faces no strategic challenge, and won’t in the foreseeable future,” said Joshua Pollack, editor of The Nonproliferation Review.
His race for nuclear supremacy, however, appears to be driving Russian weapons developers into weirder and riskier technologies
“It’s as if the nuclear and arms complexes have been unleashed to pursue their fantasies and daydreams, as if it’s the late ‘70s or early ‘80s again,” said Pollack
Some are downright “absurd,” given Russia’s overwhelming missile power, said Stein.
Putin’s new weapons programs include:
Skyfall: A cruise missile intended to achieve infinite range via an onboard nuclear-powered engine. A similar idea was abandoned by U.S. war planners in the 1960s as too dangerous, in part because the engine spewed radioactive exhaust in its wake.
Poseidon: A long-range nuclear torpedo designed to unleash a radioactive 500-meter tall tsunami against a coastal city. Western experts say the weapon appears best suited for targeting a seaside civilian population, rather than military targets.
Dagger: A plane-launched hypersonic glide missile designed to evade missile defense with advanced speed and maneuverability.
Avangard: A hypersonic winged glider weapon that’s fired high into the atmosphere before reemerging and traveling in unpredictable patterns to get around defense systems.
Disasters and cover-ups
The hush-hush atmosphere surrounding these military programs is raising anxiety that any mistakes won’t be properly accounted for — and that locals won’t get vital information they need to stay safe after a nuclear accident.
Such fears appeared to be borne out after the mysterious Aug. 8 explosion that killed seven people and sent local radiation readings spiking 16 times above average in a nearby city of almost 200,000 people.
Independent researchers, and President Trump in a tweet, linked the blast to a failed test of the Skyfall missile program. Afterwards, Russia stopped sharing data with international observers tracking nearby radionuclide monitoring stations — either for fear of causing panic, or of giving hints about the nature of their work.
Russia’s fearsome FSB spy agency reportedly forced doctors treating the wounded to sign non-disclosure agreements, and didn’t warn them patients might be radioactive. On Monday, Russia said air tests had found four kinds of radioactive particles that had been released after the explosion.
And that wasn’t an isolated incident. In July, an international team of researchers traced the origins of a huge, mysterious radioactive cloud that blanketed Europe in 2017 back to — you guessed it — Russia.
The team said the cloud posed no threat to Europe, but warned the area around the release might have faced much more serious fallout. If it did, nobody from Russia admitted it.
Naturally, after all that, Russian officials chose last week to launch a controversial floating nuclear power plant, dubbed the Akademik Lomonosov, into some of the most forbidding waters on the planet, near the Northeastern Russian coast near Alaska.
Environmentalists warn the ship is a “nuclear Titanic,” and a disaster waiting to happen.
No treaties
Of course, it takes two to make a nuclear arms race, and western experts say the U.S. shares the blame for spurring on Russia’s recent recklessness, after backing away from arms control treaties and engaging in provocative testing of its own.
“I think both sides are to blame,” said Sarah Bidgood, director of the Eurasia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, California. “But each side wants to point the finger at the other guy.”
Just last week, the U.S. test-launched a medium-range cruise missile in California for the first time since backing out of a Cold War-era treaty banning those weapons.
In response, Putin accused the U.S. of “escalating military tensions,” and ordered his defense ministry to “prepare a reciprocal response.”
Somehow, things could still get worse. Moscow has accused Trump of failing to answer calls to open up negotiations on extending the New START treaty, which reduced the number of strategic nuclear missile launchers and is set to expire in 2021.
Failure to extend New START will be “quite fatal,” warned Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, on Monday.
And without further precautions in Russia, or a new push toward transparency, these new programs are likely to carry on in the dark, where they’ll likely cause more fatal mishaps, experts said.
“We’ll undoubtedly see more accidents,” said David Szakonyi, who studies Russian affairs at George Washington University in Washington D.C. “If you don’t put new safety mechanisms in place, this is just going to keep happening and happening. I don’t see this getting better before it gets worse.”
Cover: Russian President Vladimir Putin, right, listens to President of National Research Center “Kurchatov Institute” Mikhail Kovalchuk, as he visits Kurchatov Institute of Atomic Energy, the home of the Soviet nuclear weapons program and later Soviet and Russian non-military nuclear technologies in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, April 10, 2018. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Hamas Arrests Bombers Outside the Temple Walls (Revelation 11)



The funeral of a Hamas police officer killed in a bombing on Tuesday in Gaza City.Mohammed Saber/EPA, via Shutterstock
Hamas Arrests 10 Suspects in Gaza Suicide Bombings
By Iyad Abuheweila and David M. Halbfinger
Aug. 29, 2019, 4:17 p.m. ET
GAZA CITY — Hamas, the Islamist movement that controls Gaza, said Thursday that it had arrested 10 people responsible for suicide bombings that killed three police officers in Gaza City on Tuesday.
The suspects, according to two Hamas security officials briefed on the investigation, included current and former members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a rival militant group that often works in concert with Hamas, especially against Israel.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation, said the suspects also belonged to an extremist movement, known as Salafi jihadism, that is at odds with the more moderate Hamas and has clashed repeatedly with it in recent years. Salafi jihadists view Hamas as insufficiently pious and overly interested in politics at the expense of violent struggle.
A spokesman for Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Dawoud Shehab, said that it condemned the bombings and that it eschews violence except against Israel. He did not respond to questions about the arrests of present or former members, saying only that the group was cooperating with the investigation.
A spokesman for the Hamas Interior Ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday night. Other Hamas officials have sought to portray the bombers as collaborators with Israel or as ideologically motivated individuals rather than as part of an organization.
The bombings took place less than an hour apart late Tuesday at traffic checkpoints near the seaside in Gaza City where the police routinely stop vehicles. Two of the officers killed belonged to the armed wing of Hamas.
The first blast destroyed a motorcycle as it passed a checkpoint, witnesses said, killing its rider and two police officers and wounding several others. The second killed one officer as well as the bomber and wounded several others.
No group claimed responsibility, and the Hamas Interior Ministry declared a state of emergency throughout Gaza and put security forces on alert.
The arrests were first disclosed Thursday on Twitter by Moussa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas member, who provided no further details and subsequently deleted his post. No explanation was given for the deletion and Hamas has made no further official statements on the arrests.
One of those arrested was reported to Hamas by his relatives, according to one of the security officials. Another suspect was discovered when the police found that a man who had been lightly wounded in one of the blasts had videotaped the explosion and was part of the plot, the official said.
The officials identified the suicide bombers as Mohammad al-Basous and Abdul Aziz Hajjaj.
Tensions have boiled over before between Hamas and the Salafi jihadists. In 2015, the arrest by Hamas of a leader of one such group, which pledged loyalty to the Islamic State, set off a campaign of bombings, including of a Hamas checkpoint.
Hamas, which is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, has also clashed with the Islamic State branch in Sinai, which is fighting the Egyptian military in the area.
Islamic State commanders have criticized Hamas for engaging in talks with Egypt over control of the border between Egypt and Gaza, and have publicly invited Hamas members to defect to their group.
In July 2017, jihadists allied with the Islamic State in Sinai participated in an attack on Egyptian security forces in Sinai. That came a year after the Islamic State had tried to scuttle talks between Hamas and Egypt by closing off smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza.
Iyad Abuheweila reported from Gaza City, and David M. Halbfinger from Jerusalem.

Iran’s militias will continue to act autonomously


Baghdad’s crackdown on Iran-allied militias faces resistance
BAGHDAD (Reuters) – At checkpoints leading into the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the flags of Brigade 30, a paramilitary force, still fly nearly two months after the Baghdad government ordered all militias to leave.
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi’s decree gave Iran-backed paramilitary groups, which have wielded increasing power in Iraq, a month to fully integrate with the armed forces, leave checkpoints and sever ties with political groups.
Brigade 30’s refusal to abandon its positions on the eastern edge of Mosul — instead it cut off roads and whipped up angry protests — underlines Baghdad’s struggle to assert its authority and raises the risk of further instability in a region marked by U.S.-Iranian rivalry.
Washington warned this year it would take action against Iran-backed militias if Baghdad failed to control them, and imposed sanctions on groups and their leaders, including Brigade 30’s Commander Waad Qaddo. It blamed paramilitaries for attacks on bases hosting U.S. forces in May.
Tension ramped up in the past month when alleged Israeli air strikes hit weapons depots and bases of paramilitary factions in western and central Iraq. Israel has hinted it was involved but has not explicitly said so. The Israeli military declined to comment.
Paramilitaries in turn accuse the United States of helping Israel attack their positions, and have threatened to retaliate.
The Pentagon denies involvement. No evidence has been provided for the mutual allegations.
Rivalry between Iraq’s two biggest allies, Tehran and Washington, has put the region on edge this year. Oil tankers in the Gulf have been attacked and Israel has bombed Iranian allies in Syria.
If Iraq cannot rein in its paramilitary groups, which have more than 100,000 members, there could be further violence, Iraqi officials and analysts say.
In parts of Salahuddin province, north of Baghdad, flags of some factions still fly at checkpoints and paramilitaries man roadblocks in neighboring Anbar province.
The armed groups dominate local security in some towns and cities across the country, especially territory formerly occupied by Islamic State (IS) militants. Their allies, meanwhile, occupy parliamentary seats, exercising new political strength that has deepened their influence on the government.
“Abdul Mahdi failed … to make a small group leave its positions near Mosul. It raises the question, what could he do against more powerful Iran-backed groups?” said Baghdad-based security analyst Jasim al-Bahadli.
The prime minister’s office did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. In an interview with local journalists broadcast on Aug. 9, Abdul Mahdi said the integration was complicated and would take more time.
PARAMILITARY POWER
The Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) – Iraq’s umbrella grouping of mostly Shi’ite Muslim paramilitaries backed by Iran – played a key role defeating IS and formally became part of the armed forces last year, reporting to the prime minister.
In Baghdad, its influence is growing through new senior military appointments, security sources and analysts say.
A commander from one PMF group was appointed inspector-general of the defense ministry this month.
The retirement in May of the military’s Mosul commander – a U.S. ally since the fight against IS – has made it easier to resist government efforts to bring paramilitaries in line, sources with knowledge of the appointments said.
Abdul Mahdi set a July 31 deadline for PMF factions to integrate with the armed forces, including handing over roadblocks.
PMF chief Falih al-Fayyadh said last month most factions were already complying. A PMF spokesman declined to comment for this story. The U.S. Department of Defence did not respond to a request for comment.
LEVERAGE
Analysts say Brigade 30, like other groups that took territory in northern Iraq as they fought IS, is reluctant to give up power.
The faction, controlled by Iraq’s Shi’ite Shabak minority, is one of a number of paramilitary groups in Iraq’s northern Nineveh province believed to control parts of the local economy. The PMF has denied its members are involved in trade..
“Brigade 30 have gained quite a bit of leverage in Mosul … they feel like they made some good gains during the fight and are now being told to give up major checkpoints,” said Renad Mansour, a research fellow at Chatham House.
Commander Waad Qaddo’s office declined to comment. Washington placed him on a sanctions list in July over alleged human rights abuses and corruption.
In response to Abdul Mahdi’s decree, Qaddo’s group bulldozed dirt barriers onto a highway leading into Iraq’s second-largest city in early August. Supporters blocked roads and burned tires as the army stood by.
Demonstrating the group’s political heft, the PMF’s top leadership negotiated joint checkpoint control between Brigade 30, the army and local officials.
Supporters said abandoning checkpoints could leave the Shabak open to the same abuse and killings minorities suffered at the hands of the Sunni extremist IS in Sunni Arab majority Mosul.
“We’ll stay in the area to protect our people,” pro-PMF lawmaker Qusay al-Shabaki said.
Mosul lawmakers and security sources say the episode showed how easily one faction could oppose the government, even as the PMF says it is obeying the prime minister.
“Nineveh is under the pressure of the PMF. It’s the main power in the province now – the army has become a secondary force,” MP Shirwan Dubardani said.
Additional reporting by Ghazwan Hassan in Tikrit, Kamal Ayash in Falluja, Ali Idrees in Washington and Dan Williams in Jerusalem.; Editing by Carmel Crimmins.

America’s presence in Iraq will precipitate World War III



Israeli strikes raise questions about US presence in Iraq
The likely spillover of an expanding tit-for-tat between Israel and Iran into Iraq has left the Donald Trump administration nervous about sustaining a long-term US presence in the war-weary nation.
A suspected Israeli strike against an Iran-backed convoy crossing the border between Iraq and Syria on Sunday night prompted the Pentagon to rush out a rare statement denying American involvement. The attack on the convoy, which was en route to Damascus, Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) bases and ammunition dumps, killed nine Shiite militants.
“US forces did not conduct the recent attack on a convoy or any recent attacks that resulted in the explosion of ammunition storage facilities in Iraq,” the Pentagon said on Monday. “Statements to the contrary are false, misleading and inflammatory.”
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi and President Barham Salih quickly decried the airstrikes as an “attack on Iraqi sovereignty.” While the US military has a long-standing invitation from Baghdad to fight the Islamic State, Israel has no formal authorization to conduct cross-border attacks.
Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strikes, but the move has raised suspicions among experts that the Israel Defense Forces did not check in with the Pentagon ahead of the attacks.
“I don’t think the Pentagon was in the loop on this. I don’t think the State Department was either,” a former US official told Al-Monitor. “The people who are vested in the long-term Iraq project weren’t in the loop on this and they’re pissed, because now all of a sudden the question of US presence is back on the table again, when we had this firmly off the table.”
The Trump administration had to deal with questions from Iraqi lawmakers about the long-term American presence in the country earlier this year, when President Trump told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in February that US troops would remain at al-Asad air base to “watch” Iran.
In the Pentagon’s first press conference since August 2018, Defense Secretary Mark Esper said today that the US focus in Iraq remains “to go after” the Islamic State but did not address allegations that Israel was involved in the strikes. US officials told the Associated Press earlier this month that Israel targeted a PMU ammunition dump in Amerli in July.
But the reemergence of questions about the US presence comes as Israeli forces have started to hit Iranian proxy groups throughout the region. In the past week, the Israeli air force has also destroyed sites in Syria and exploded two drones in Beirut, prompting a stern televised speech from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
Israeli observers have been keen to point out that difficult political realities underlie the recent spate of attacks. Trump’s close ally, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, faces a tight reelection race in little over two weeks, after the Israeli leader was unable to secure a majority of seats in the Knesset earlier this year.
“Elections,” said Alon Pinkas, a former chief of staff to Israel’s prime minister, when asked about the motivation for the strikes. An Israeli security source told Al-Monitor earlier this week that Iran’s intensification of belligerence against Israel was “all Soleimani,” in reference to Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force.
Pinkas, who was a foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Barak, said the strikes inside Iraq were unlikely to deter the Iran-backed PMU from operating in the war-torn country, where Israel has limited experience in operations since striking a nuclear reactor there in 1981.
“How could they? With random bombings every four to six weeks,” he said. “Netanyahu can’t even change the Iranian dynamics is Syria, a few miles from the Golan Heights. And that’s after bragging shamelessly about his close relationship with Putin and how Trump does what he wants.”
But experts said Israel’s suspected hand in the attacks could strengthen Iran-backed forces in the country in the short-term, giving them political leverage to shirk Baghdad’s efforts to assert more control.
“This is just contrary to US national interests in Iraq in all kinds of ways,” said the former US official, adding that Iran-backed groups “have the upper hand now. They’re now seen as the martyrs to the Israelis, which gives them a lot of moral capital.”

Pakistan Prepares for Nuclear War



ISLAMABAD: Pakistan railways minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed on Wednesday predicted that a full-blown war between India and Pakistan may likely occur in the month of “October or the next month.” While addressing media in Rawalpindi, Rashid claimed that ‘decisive time for Kashmir’s struggle’ has come. “This is going to be the last war between both countries,” he was quoted as saying by Pakistan Today.
Pak minister predicts war with India in ‘October or following month’
ANI | Updated: Aug 28, 2019, 5:24 IST
The remark by Pakistan minister comes two days after Prime Minister Imran Khan threatened India of a nuclear war. Khan in a televised address said that his country will go to any extent for Kashmir and asserted that Islamabad wouldn’t be afraid of using its nuclear powers for Kashmir.
Pakistan has been rattled by the Indian government’s move to strip the special status accorded to Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 and has found itself completely isolated despite desperate attempts aimed at internationalising the issue.
Meanwhile, reiterating the similar rhetoric, the railway minister once again urged his countrymen to stand in solidarity with the Kashmiris in the Valley and promised to visit them after Muharram.
“Jinnah had assessed the anti-Muslim mindset in India long ago. Those who still think about the possibility of dialogue with India are fools,” Rashid added.
Prime Minister Modi, during his meeting with US President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the G7 summit in the southwestern French city of Biarritz, had reiterated India’s continued standpoint over the issue that Kashmir is an internal matter of India, and New Delhi and Islamabad can resolve their issues bilaterally.
Islamabad has been snubbed on all fronts as the international community has made it clear that the Kashmir issue is strictly New Delhi’s internal matter.
The country, which is finding it hard to uphold its struggling economy is now looking forward to raise the issue during the United Nations General Assembly meet in New York next month.
The Pakistan government has downgraded bilateral ties with India in the wake of the decision and said it will consider all steps to counter what it described “illegal steps” taken by New Delhi.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

Quakeland: New York and the Sixth Seal

Quakeland: On the Road to America’s Next Devastating Earthquake
Roger Bilham
Given recent seismic activity — political as well as geological — it’s perhaps unsurprising that two books on earthquakes have arrived this season. One is as elegant as the score of a Beethoven symphony; the other resembles a diary of conversations overheard during a rock concert. Both are interesting, and both relate recent history to a shaky future.
Journalist Kathryn Miles’s Quakeland is a litany of bad things that happen when you provoke Earth to release its invisible but ubiquitous store of seismic-strain energy, either by removing fluids (oil, water, gas) or by adding them in copious quantities (when extracting shale gas in hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracking, or when injecting contaminated water or building reservoirs). To complete the picture, she describes at length the bad things that happen during unprovoked natural earthquakes. As its subtitle hints, the book takes the form of a road trip to visit seismic disasters both past and potential, and seismologists and earthquake engineers who have first-hand knowledge of them. Their colourful personalities, opinions and prejudices tell a story of scientific discovery and engineering remedy.
Miles poses some important societal questions. Aside from human intervention potentially triggering a really damaging earthquake, what is it actually like to live in neighbourhoods jolted daily by magnitude 1–3 earthquakes, or the occasional magnitude 5? Are these bumps in the night acceptable? And how can industries that perturb the highly stressed rocks beneath our feet deny obvious cause and effect? In 2015, the Oklahoma Geological Survey conceded that a quadrupling of the rate of magnitude-3 or more earthquakes in recent years, coinciding with a rise in fracking, was unlikely to represent a natural process. Miles does not take sides, but it’s difficult for the reader not to.
She visits New York City, marvelling at subway tunnels and unreinforced masonry almost certainly scheduled for destruction by the next moderate earthquake in the vicinity. She considers the perils of nuclear-waste storage in Nevada and Texas, and ponders the risks to Idaho miners of rock bursts — spontaneous fracture of the working face when the restraints of many million years of confinement are mined away. She contemplates the ups and downs of the Yellowstone Caldera — North America’s very own mid-continent supervolcano — and its magnificently uncertain future. Miles also touches on geothermal power plants in southern California’s Salton Sea and elsewhere; the vast US network of crumbling bridges, dams and oil-storage farms; and the magnitude 7–9 earthquakes that could hit California and the Cascadia coastline of Oregon and Washington state this century. Amid all this doom, a new elementary school on the coast near Westport, Washington, vulnerable to inbound tsunamis, is offered as a note of optimism. With foresight and much persuasion from its head teacher, it was engineered to become an elevated safe haven.
Miles briefly discusses earthquake prediction and the perils of getting it wrong (embarrassment in New Madrid, Missouri, where a quake was predicted but never materialized; prison in L’Aquila, Italy, where scientists failed to foresee a devastating seismic event) and the successes of early-warning systems, with which electronic alerts can be issued ahead of damaging seismic waves. Yes, it’s a lot to digest, but most of the book obeys the laws of physics, and it is a engaging read. One just can’t help wishing that Miles’s road trips had taken her somewhere that wasn’t a disaster waiting to happen.
Catastrophic damage in Anchorage, Alaska, in 1964, caused by the second-largest earthquake in the global instrumental record.
In The Great Quake, journalist Henry Fountain provides us with a forthright and timely reminder of the startling historical consequences of North America’s largest known earthquake, which more than half a century ago devastated southern Alaska. With its epicentre in Prince William Sound, the 1964 quake reached magnitude 9.2, the second largest in the global instrumental record. It released more energy than either the 2004 Sumatra–Andaman earthquake or the 2011 Tohoku earthquake off Japan; and it generated almost as many pages of scientific commentary and description as aftershocks. Yet it has been forgotten by many.
The quake was scientifically important because it occurred at a time when plate tectonics was in transition from hypothesis to theory. Fountain expertly traces the theory’s historical development, and how the Alaska earthquake was pivotal in nailing down one of the most important predictions. The earthquake caused a fjordland region larger than England to subside, and a similarly huge region of islands offshore to rise by many metres; but its scientific implications were not obvious at the time. Eminent seismologists thought that a vertical fault had slipped, drowning forests and coastlines to its north and raising beaches and islands to its south. But this kind of fault should have reached the surface, and extended deep into Earth’s mantle. There was no geological evidence of a monster surface fault separating these two regions, nor any evidence for excessively deep aftershocks. The landslides and liquefied soils that collapsed houses, and the tsunami that severely damaged ports and infrastructure, offered no clues to the cause.
“Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about present-day vulnerability.” The hero of The Great Quake is the geologist George Plafker, who painstakingly mapped the height reached by barnacles lifted out of the intertidal zone along shorelines raised by the earthquake, and documented the depths of drowned forests. He deduced that the region of subsidence was the surface manifestation of previously compressed rocks springing apart, driving parts of Alaska up and southwards over the Pacific Plate. His finding confirmed a prediction of plate tectonics, that the leading edge of the Pacific Plate plunged beneath the southern edge of Alaska along a gently dipping thrust fault. That observation, once fully appreciated, was applauded by the geophysics community.
Fountain tells this story through the testimony of survivors, engineers and scientists, interweaving it with the fascinating history of Alaska, from early discovery by Europeans to purchase from Russia by the United States in 1867, and its recent development. Were the quake to occur now, it is not difficult to envisage that with increased infrastructure and larger populations, the death toll and price tag would be two orders of magnitude larger than the 139 fatalities and US$300-million economic cost recorded in 1964.
What is clear from these two books is that seismicity on the North American continent is guaranteed to deliver surprises, along with unprecedented economic and human losses. Previous earthquakes provide clear guidance about the present-day vulnerability of US infrastructure and populations. Engineers and seismologists know how to mitigate the effects of future earthquakes (and, in mid-continent, would advise against the reckless injection of waste fluids known to trigger earthquakes). It is merely a matter of persuading city planners and politicians that if they are tempted to ignore the certainty of the continent’s seismic past, they should err on the side of caution when considering its seismic future.

The Coming Tribulations (Revelation 8 & 16)



Nuclear winter would threaten nearly everyone on Earth: Second study of its kind confirms extreme impacts from US vs. Russia nuclear war
Indeed, death by famine would threaten nearly all of the Earth’s 7.7 billion people, said co-author Alan Robock, a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
The study in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres provides more evidence to support The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons passed by the United Nations two years ago, Robock said. Twenty-five nations have ratified the treaty so far, not including the United States, and it would take effect when the number hits 50.
Lead author Joshua Coupe, a Rutgers doctoral student, and other scientists used a modern climate model to simulate the climatic effects of an all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Such a war could send 150 million tons of black smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas into the lower and upper atmosphere, where it could linger for months to years and block sunlight. The scientists used a new climate model from the National Center for Atmospheric Research with higher resolution and improved simulations compared with a NASA model used by a Robock-led team 12 years ago.
The new model represents the Earth at many more locations and includes simulations of the growth of the smoke particles and ozone destruction from the heating of the atmosphere. Still, the climate response to a nuclear war from the new model was nearly identical to that from the NASA model.
“This means that we have much more confidence in the climate response to a large-scale nuclear war,” Coupe said. “There really would be a nuclear winter with catastrophic consequences.”
In both the new and old models, a nuclear winter occurs as soot (black carbon) in the upper atmosphere blocks sunlight and causes global average surface temperatures to plummet by more than 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
Because a major nuclear war could erupt by accident or as a result of hacking, computer failure or an unstable world leader, the only safe action that the world can take is to eliminate nuclear weapons, said Robock, who works in the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences.

Suicide Bombers Outside the Temple Walls (Revelation 11)



Palestinians examined the destroyed booth of a police checkpoint after an explosion in Gaza City on Tuesday.Mahmud Hams/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Suicide Bombers Hit Hamas Police Checkpoints in Gaza
By Iyad Abuheweila and Declan Walsh
Aug. 28, 2019
GAZA — Two suicide bombers hit Hamas police checkpoints in Gaza City late Tuesday, killing three police officers and wounding three other Palestinians, security officials said on Wednesday, in an uncommon attack from within the territory.
Two of the officers were part of the armed wing of Hamas, the Islamist militant group that governs Gaza. The group has been mostly engaged in cross-border clashes with the Israeli military. But at times it has faced internal opposition from more stringent Islamist militants aligned with Al Qaeda or the Islamic State.
Eyad al-Buzom, a spokesman for Hamas’s Interior Ministry, said in a local TV interview that two suicide bombers had carried out the attacks at the checkpoints. He said that security forces were investigating the explosions and that a number of suspects had been arrested.
Hamas’s intelligence was able to identify the attackers, officials said, but their names were not immediately revealed. No further details were released.
No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but local reports said that the blasts were believed to have been the work of bombers aligned with the Islamic State group. Other officials said they believed the attackers were either Islamic State members or collaborators with Israel.
Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman, said the attacks “only serve” Israel, describing them as “suspicious bombings” that harmed the armed struggle against Israel.
A spokesman for the Israeli military said he knew of no involvement by Israel in the blasts.
The Interior Ministry of Hamas declared a state of emergency throughout Gaza, putting security forces on alert.
“The hand of treachery and treason that carried out the crime of bombings will be chopped off from the roots,” Hamas said in a statement.
Palestinian officials vehemently denounced the attack in statements and called for severe punishment for the assailants.
The attack left body parts strewn over the site and puddles of blood covering the ground. Police officers and masked forces from the military wing of Hamas were deployed to the explosion site, blocking roads and imposing traffic controls.
The first blast destroyed a motorcycle as it passed a police checkpoint, witnesses told reporters. Two police officers were killed and a third Palestinian wounded. It was not immediately clear whether the riders were among the casualties.
The second explosion, less than an hour later, killed one officer and wounded at least two other people at a police checkpoint elsewhere in the city, the Interior Ministry said.
Tensions have been high for several years between Hamas and the Islamic State branch in Sinai, which is fighting the Egyptian military in the area. The Islamic State fighters subscribe to a Salafist ideology that is at odds with the more pragmatic approach of Hamas, which is rooted in the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt.
Islamic State fighters see themselves as part of a global jihadist movement, while Hamas is part of the Palestinian resistance to Israel. On the ground, the two groups have had violent clashes and political disagreements, most notably over Hamas’s relations with Egypt and control of smuggling tunnels on the border between Egypt and Gaza.
Islamic State commanders, in turn, have criticized Hamas for engaging in talks with Egypt over control of the border between Egypt and Gaza, and have publicly invited Hamas members to defect to their group.
In July 2017, jihadists allied with Islamic State in Sinai participated in an attack on Egyptian security forces in Sinai. That came a year after the Islamic State had tried to scupper talks between Hamas and Egypt by closing off smuggling tunnels between Sinai and Gaza.
Hamas, which took over Gaza after a 2007 civil war with the forces of President Mahmoud Abbas, has clashed with the Israeli miliary as it seeks a loosening of the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
A series of violent clashes and cease-fires has unfolded between the group and the Israeli military. In May, in some of the worst fighting in years, Palestinian militants launched about 250 rockets and mortar shells into southern Israel, and the Israeli military responded with airstrikes and tank fire against targets across the Palestinian territory
More than two dozen people — at least 22 Palestinians and four Israeli civilians — were killed, and homes and businesses were destroyed, in the fighting.
In March, Israel and Hamas exchanged rocket fire, with one striking the village of Mishmeret, about 20 miles north of Tel Aviv, the Israeli military said. Hamas neither confirmed nor denied that it had carried out the attack. Hours later, Israeli warplanes struck back at Hamas targets throughout the Gaza Strip.
Later on Wednesday, Ismail Haniya, the leader of Hamas, and officials from several other Palestinian factions mourned the victims as their bodies — wrapped in Palestinian flags — were carried in a police motorcade to cemeteries in the Gaza Strip.
Iyad Abuheweila reported from Gaza, and Declan Walsh from Cairo, Egypt.