Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

ordinary, am assuming, since you drifted to creating "tremors on a planetary scale", you are
not dismissing out-of-hand the thoughts of the considerable number of scientists about the world,
who have seen evidence that nuclear explosions could have contributed to earthquakes. .. repeat link ..

Bomb Tests and Earthquakes .. Nuclear bomb testing has doubled the earthquake rate.
Gary Whiteford, Professor of Geography, University of New Brunswick

Abnormal meteorological phenomena, earthquakes and fluctuations of the earth's
axis are related in a direct cause-and-effect to testing of nuclear devices.
Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President Tokai University Yoshio Kato, Department of Aerospace Science

On June 19, 1992, the United States conducted an underground nuclear bomb test in Nevada. Another test was conducted only four days afterwards. Three days later, a series of heavy earthquakes as high as 7.6 on the Richter scale rocked the Mojave desert 176 miles to the south. They were the biggest earthquakes to hit California this century. Only 22 hours later, an "unrelated" earthquake of 5.6 struck less than 20 miles from the Nevada test site itself. It was the biggest earthquake ever recorded near the test site and caused one-million dollars of damage to buildings in an area designated for permanent dispoasal of highly radiocative nuclear wastes only fifteen miles from the epicenter of the earthquake. Although the quake provoked renewed calls for a halt to plans for storing radioactive materials in such an unstable area, the larger questions have still not been raised in the United States: Do bomb tests actually cause earthquakes? Do nuclear tests make the planet more prone to geologic disruption?

Understandable Unease

The latest (and apparently continuing) earthquakes in California and Nevada suggest an inquiry by U.S. scientists may be long overdue, and could lead to an examination of studies over the past twenty years from scientists in Britain, Germany, Japan and Canada, warning that nuclear tests are weakening the earth's crust, triggering earthquakes and causing the earth's pole to shift.
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Insert: hmmm, causing the earth's pole to shift, too, eh. Any connection to climate change? Maybe not.

Various theories have surfaced on the Internet and elsewhere regarding a future shift in the Earth's poles. Many of these theories
place the date at December 21, 2012, with a connection to the Mayan Calendar. While Earth's magnetic poles can and do
shift, the process is gradual, and there is no scientific evidence to suggest that this will occur in the near future.
http://www.mahalo.com/2012-pole-shift

Ok, so that's what one Mayan reference was. The Armageddon scenario is heaven in too
many eyes, talk about a hunger for pessimism! Yeah, a boon to exploitative Hollywood, too.
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In a statement on July 14, 1992, responding to "understandable unease", the Department of Energy in Washington asserted the relationship between nuclear testing and earthquakes is "nonexistent." Yet common sense would suggest the cumulative effect of so may nuclear tests around the world would leave the planet at least somewhat shaken. Indeed in 1956, Estes Kefauver, then Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, warned, "H bomb tests could knock the earth 16 degrees off its axis!" He was simply ignored.

However, in a study twenty years later by two Japanese scientists, entitled Recent Abnormal Phenomena on Earth and Atomic Power Tests, Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President of Tokai University, and Yoshio Kato, Head of the University's Department of Aerospace Science concluded:

Abnormal meteorological phenomena, earthquakes and fluctuations of the earth's axis are related in a direct cause-and-effect to testing of nuclear devices. . . . Nuclear testing is the cause of abnormal polar motion of the earth. By applying the dates of nuclear tests with a force of more than 150 kilotons, we found it obvious that the position of the pole slid radically at the time of the nuclear explosion. . . . Some of the sudden changes measured up to one meter in distance.

Not quite Kefauver's 16 degrees off the axis; but not entirely reassuring
either. Two years later, on 12 October 1978, the British New Scientist reported:

Geophysicists in Germany and England believe the 1978 earthquake in Tabas, Iran, in which at least twenty-five thousand people were killed, may have been triggered by an underground nuclear explosion. . . . British seismologists believe the Tabas earthquake implies a nuclear test that has gone awry. . . . Moreover, a seismic laboratory in Uppsala, Sweden, recorded a Soviet nuclear test of unusual size--ten megatons--at Semipalitinsk only thirty-six hours before. . . . One German scientist specifically implicated this test in the origin of Tabas disaster.

More recently, on 14 April, 1989, at the Second Annual Conference on the United Nations and World Peace in Seattle, Washington, Gary T. Whiteford, Professor of Geography at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, presented the most exhaustive study yet of the correlation's between nuclear testing and earthquakes. In a paper entitled Earthquakes and Nuclear Testing: Dangerous Patterns and Trends, Whiteford presented alarming conclusions which to this day have remained almost completely ignored in the United States, although the paper has been widely translated and published abroad.

Whiteford studied all earthquakes this century of more than 5.8 on the Richter scale. "Below that intensity," he explained, "some earthquakes would have passed unrecorded in the earlier part of the century when measuring devices were less sensitive and less ubiquitous. But for bigger quakes the records are detailed and complete for the entire planet." So Whiteford was able to make a simple comparison of the earthquake rate in the first half of the century, before nuclear testing, and the rate for 1950 to 1988. In the fifty years before testing, large earthquakes of more than 5.8 occurred at an average rate of 68 per year. With the advent of testing the rate rose "suddenly and dramatically" to an average of 127 a year. The earthquake rate has almost doubled. To this day the U.S. military attributes the increase to "coincidence." As Whiteford comments, "The geographical patterns in the data, with a clustering of earthquakes in specific regions matched to specific test dates and sites do not support the easy and comforting explanation of `pure coincidence.' It is a dangerous coincidence."

http://www.ratical.org/radiation/inetSeries/testsNquakes.html

We might consider 1990, 1992, 1996 as more important years than many others ..

The last underground test by the United States was in 1992, the Soviet Union in 1990, the United Kingdom in 1991, and both
France and China continued testing until 1996. After adopting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, all of these states
have pledged to discontinue all nuclear testing. Non-signatories India and Pakistan last tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

which brings us back to India and Pakistan .......

ps: today, weeding has been my chief recreation .. mental health breaks ..