Before The Sixth Seal (Revelation 6)

Earthquake centered north of Morris Plains

William Westhoven , @WWesthoven Published 11:31 a.m. ET March 27, 2017 | Updated 9 hours ago

Geologists recorded a small earthquake that occurred — but apparently escaped the notice of residents — on Saturday afternoon in Morris Plains.

The tremor, registering a minor 1.3 on the Richter Scale, was reported by Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Observatory to the Morris Plains Police Department, which issued an advisory to residents on Monday morning.

“To date (there) were no reported injuries or damage related to the earthquake and no Morris Plains residents reported any activity to this agency,” Chief Jason A. Kohn wrote.

Lamont-Doherty spokesperson Kevin Krajick said the quake was pinpointed to a shallow depth of 6 kilometers just north of Grannis Avenue, between mountain and Sun Valley ways, about 500 feet southeast of Mountain way School.

“It was a very small earthquake at a very shallow depth,” Krajick said. “Most people would not feel an earthquake that small unless they were absolutely right under it, if that.”

Krajick said major earthquakes occur at depths of as much as 10-20 miles “or even more.”

Lamont-Doherty seismologist Mitch Gold said there was no particular fault line to identify under Morris Plains.

“It’s not like California, where the fault lines are more defined,” Gold said.

Gold said the northern New Jersey region had been quiet of late, but several minor quakes were felt last year in Kinnelon, Butler, Riverdale and other points in northern Morris in the area of the Ramapo fault line. Butler police received several calls on Aug. 8 from residents who felt a small earthquake.

“Yes, we got a bunch of calls about it, between 9:30 and 10:30,” Butler Police Lt. Mike Moore said.

The 1.0 magnitude quake, which was registered by the USGS at 10:01 p.m., was centered near the eastern shore of the Wanaque Reservoir in Wanaque, about six miles from the Morris County borders of Butler and Riverdale, according to the United States Geological Survey.

Another quake — a 1.1 magnitude felt in Kinnelon and Butler — occurred at 4:06 a.m. on July 4, at a depth of two kilometers and occurring about one kilometer east southeast of Kinnelon, according to the USGS.

Three more minor earthquakes jolted northern Morris County on Feb. 21, three days after a larger quake was felt in the same area. The epicenter of those earthquakes was about 1 mile northeast of Kinnelon. All were minor tremors, the first registering a magnitude of 0.6 at 10:07 a.m., and the second registering a 0.1 at 10:48 a.m. Both of those tremors were estimated to have originated at a depth of 1 mile. A third and final quake registered a 0.2, originating at a depth of 0.3 miles.

The USGS says earthquakes with a magnitude between 1.0 and 3.0 aren’t typically felt. But Butler Police Chief Ciro Chimento previously confirmed his department received more than 1,000 calls about a 1.6-magnitude quake that occurred on the evening of Feb. 18.

Another magnitude-2.07 earthquake also hit northern New Jersey on Jan. 2. Mahwah residents as well as those in New York’s Rockland County also reported feeling that quake.

Earthquakes are generally less frequent and less intense in the northeast compared to the U.S. Pacific Coast, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection. But due to geological differences between the regions, earthquakes of similar magnitude affect an area 10 times larger in the Northeast U.S. compared the West Coast.

New Jersey’s largest recorded earthquake occurred in 1783. Felt from New Hampshire to Pennsylvania, that earthquake was estimated at a magnitude of 5.3.

New Jersey has never recorded a fatality due to an earthquake, according to the DEP.

Staff Writer William Westhoven: 973-917-9242; wwesthoven@gannettnj.com.

Fear The Pakistan Horn (Revelation 8)

Forget North Korea: A Nuclear War Betweeen India and Pakistan Should Terrify You

Sebastien Roblin

While the United States is preoccupied by the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of potential adversaries such as Russia, China or North Korea, the danger of nuclear conflict may actually be greatest between two of its allies, Pakistan and India. The two nations have engaged in four wars starting since their partition along religious lines in 1947. A fifth could be drastically more costly, as their nuclear capabilities continue to grow and diversify.

Several years ago I made the acquaintance of a Pakistani nuclear science student in China. Curious about the thinking behind his country’s nuclear program, I asked if he really believed there was a possibility that India would invade Pakistan. “There’s still a lot of old-school thinkers in the Congress Party that believe India and Pakistan should be united,” he told me.

I doubt there are many observers outside of Pakistan who believe India is plotting to invade and occupy the Muslim state, but a feeling of existential enmity persists. The third conflict between the two countries in 1971 established India’s superiority in conventional warfare—not unexpectedly, as India has several times Pakistan’s population.

The bone of contention has always been the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir. At the time of partition, the predominantly Muslim state was politically divided over which nation to join. When Pakistani-allied tribesmen attempted to force the issue, the Hindu maharaja of the region chose to accede to India, leading to the first war between India and Pakistan. Ever since, the line of control between the Indian and Pakistan side has remained bitterly contested, with artillery and sniper fire routinely exchanged. Pakistan intelligence services have infiltrated insurgents and plotted attacks across the border for decades, and Indian security troops have been implicated in human-rights violations and killings of the locals as a result of their counterinsurgency operations.

Pakistan does have to fear the potential of an Indian counterstrike intended to retaliate for a terrorist attack by Pakistani-aligned groups, such as the killing of 166 in Mumbai by Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2008 or the attack on Indian parliament in 2001 by Jaish-e-Muhammad. In both cases, the attackers had ties with Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, and Islamabad has shown limited willingness or ability to crack down on these groups. Complicating matters, civilian control of the military is far from consolidated in Pakistan, and it would be quite possible for ISI or some other agency to carry out such activities on its own initiative without the knowledge or support of the head of state.

India’s military has formulated a “Cold Start” doctrine to enable its forward-deployed land forces to launch an armored assault into Pakistani territory on short notice in response to a perceived provocation from Islamabad. This new strategy was devised after the Indian Army’s armored strike corps took three weeks to deploy to the border after the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, by which time Pakistan had already mobilized its own troops.

Islamabad sees nuclear weapons as its deterrent against a conventional attack, and Cold Start in particular. This is demonstrated by its refusal to adhere to a “No First Use” policy. Pakistan has an extensive plutonium production capacity, and is estimated to possess 130 to 140 warheads, a total that may easily increase to 220 to 250 in a decade, according to a report by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Many of the new weapons are smaller, short-range tactical weapons intended for targeting frontline troops. To enable a second-strike capability, Pakistan has also empowered local commanders to launch retaliatory nuclear strikes in case the chain of command is disrupted.

While battlefield nuclear weapons are less likely to cause the mass civilian casualties that a strike against a densely populated city would produce, they are deeply worrying in their own way: a state may be more tempted to employ tactical nuclear weapons, and perceive doing so as being intrinsically less risky. However, many simulations of nuclear war suggest that tactical-nuclear-weapon usage rapidly escalates to strategic weapons.

Furthermore, tactical nuclear weapons are necessarily more dispersed, and thus less secure than those stationed in permanent facilities. These issues led the U.S. Army to at first reorganize its tactical nuclear forces in the 1960s, and largely abandon them after the end of the Cold War.

Pakistan fields nearly a dozen different types of missiles to facilitate this strategy, developed with Chinese and North Korean assistance. Ground based tactical systems include the Hatf I, an unguided ground-based rocket with a range of one hundred kilometers, and the Nasr Hatf IX, which can be mounted on mobile quad-launchers. Longer reach is provided by Ghauri II and Shaheen II medium-range ballistic missiles, which can strike targets up to around 1,600 and 2,500 kilometers, respectively.