East Coast Quakes and the Sixth Seal: Revelation 6

Items lie on the floor of a grocery store after an earthquake on Sunday, August 9, 2020 in North Carolina.

East Coast Quakes: What to Know About the Tremors Below

By Meteorologist Dominic Ramunni Nationwide PUBLISHED 7:13 PM ET Aug. 11, 2020 PUBLISHED 7:13 PM EDT Aug. 11, 2020

People across the Carolinas and Mid-Atlantic were shaken, literally, on a Sunday morning as a magnitude 5.1 earthquake struck in North Carolina on August 9, 2020.

Centered in Sparta, NC, the tremor knocked groceries off shelves and left many wondering just when the next big one could strike.

Fault Lines

Compared to the West Coast, there are far fewer fault lines in the East. This is why earthquakes in the East are relatively uncommon and weaker in magnitude.

That said, earthquakes still occur in the East.

According to Spectrum News Meteorologist Matthew East, “Earthquakes have occurred in every eastern U.S. state, and a majority of states have recorded damaging earthquakes. However, they are pretty rare. For instance, the Sparta earthquake Sunday was the strongest in North Carolina in over 100 years.”

While nowhere near to the extent of the West Coast, damaging earthquakes can and do affect much of the eastern half of the country.

For example, across the Tennesse River Valley lies the New Madrid Fault Line. While much smaller in size than those found farther west, the fault has managed to produce several earthquakes over magnitude 7.0 in the last couple hundred years.

In 1886, an estimated magnitude 7.0 struck Charleston, South Carolina along a previously unknown seismic zone. Nearly the entire town had to be rebuilt.

Vulnerabilities

The eastern half of the U.S. has its own set of vulnerabilities from earthquakes.

Seismic waves actually travel farther in the East as opposed to the West Coast. This is because the rocks that make up the East are tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years older than in the West.

These older rocks have had much more time to bond together with other rocks under the tremendous pressure of Earth’s crust. This allows seismic energy to transfer between rocks more efficiently during an earthquake, causing the shaking to be felt much further.

This is why, during the latest quake in North Carolina, impacts were felt not just across the state, but reports of shaking came as far as Atlanta, Georgia, nearly 300 miles away.

Reports of shaking from different earthquakes of similar magnitude.

Quakes in the East can also be more damaging to infrastructure than in the West. This is generally due to the older buildings found east. Architects in the early-to-mid 1900s simply were not accounting for earthquakes in their designs for cities along the East Coast.

When a magnitude 5.8 earthquake struck Virginia in 2011, not only were numerous historical monuments in Washington, D.C. damaged, shaking was reported up and down the East Coast with tremors even reported in Canada.

Unpredictable

There is no way to accurately predict when or where an earthquake may strike.

Some quakes will have a smaller earthquake precede the primary one. This is called a foreshock.

The problem is though, it’s difficult to say whether the foreshock is in fact a foreshock and not the primary earthquake. Only time will tell the difference.

The United State Geological Survey (USGS) is experimenting with early warning detection systems in the West Coast.

While this system cannot predict earthquakes before they occur, they can provide warning up to tens of seconds in advance that shaking is imminent. This could provide just enough time to find a secure location before the tremors begin.

Much like hurricanes, tornadoes, or snowstorms, earthquakes are a natural occuring phenomenon that we can prepare for.

The USGS provides an abundance of resources on how to best stay safe when the earth starts to quake.

US should be cautious in delivering more military support to Pakistan

Representative Image. Image Credit: ANI

US should be cautious, hesitant in delivering more military support to Pakistan: Report

By fulfilling Pakistan’s wishes on the F-16, the Biden administration may be hoping it will help shore up the fragile governing coalition from outside interference. However, it is the machinations of Pakistan’s military that remain constant and will continue to shape what transpires within the country.

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ANI | Updated: 20-11-2022 08:35 IST | Created: 20-11-2022 08:35 IST

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The US should be cautious and hesitant in delivering more military support to Pakistan, such as the F-16s, where there is no guarantee that they will be used competently. Dr Sajjan M Gohel, the international security director at the Asia-Pacific Foundation think-tank and Marcus Andreopoulos, a senior research fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, writing in War On The Rocks (WOTR) said that by fulfilling Pakistan’s wishes on the F-16, the Biden administration may be hoping it will help shore up the fragile governing coalition from outside interference. However, it is the machinations of Pakistan’s military that remain constant and will continue to shape what transpires within the country.

The Biden administration authorized the sale of military equipment worth USD 450 million to Pakistan to enhance the air-to-ground capabilities of the country’s current stock of F-16 fighter aircraft. This most recent sale is the latest chapter in a decades-long back and forth between Washington and Islamabad, in which bilateral relations have fluctuated erratically, said Gohel and Andreopoulos.

The contorted situation of the F-16 raises a perennial yet fundamental dilemma on whether Washington can ever really achieve its objectives with Pakistan regarding cooperation in preventing Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorist groups, curtailing nuclear proliferation, ending hostilities with India, and containing China‘s expanding clout in South Asia. The answers will likely turn out to be disappointing, as they have in the past. In part, this is because multiple US administrations pass laws with the intention of taking a principled stand in holding Pakistan accountable for its ties to terrorism or nuclear proliferation but then subsequently seek to find workarounds when there is an impending strategic security concern. Pakistan has understood this all too well, reported WOTR.

For Pakistan’s establishment, statecraft of strategic depth outweighs the economic and social challenges that continue to engulf the country and which in turn heighten insecurity in the region. The security ramifications of how the United States handles the F-16 matter carry enormous geopolitical significance, ranging from nuclear conflict, conventional warfare, counter-terrorism, and containing Chinese influence, said Gohel and Andreopoulos.

The history of US negotiations with Pakistan illustrates that the temporary, tactical, and transactional nature of the relationship has enabled Pakistan to pursue its adversarial military doctrine of strategic depth in Afghanistan to hedge against India, in which the F-16s became a key tool, while also furthering the ambitions of a nuclear weapons programme. F-16 refurbishments are not going to resolve Pakistan’s crippling economic and humanitarian crisis and may instead contribute to the cychttp://andrewtheprophetle of military opaqueness and intransigence over the stable democratic civilian rule, reported WOTR.

Washington should stop using F-16s to try and leverage security and non-proliferation commitments from Pakistan. As Pakistan is mired in political, economic, and environmental instability, the risk is that providing Islamabad with more weapons will be counterproductive because they exacerbate regional tensions, said Gohel and Andreopoulos. Instead, Washington should recognize that these sales and upgrades prop up actors in the country that sometimes work against American interests, all but ensuring that clashes over the sale of this jet — and other American hardware — will continue long into the future.

Moreover, the nuclear risk is a by-product of Pakistan’s instability, which has occurred directly due to the troubling relationship its military sustains with violent extremists. Pakistan’s commitment to preserve its nuclear arsenal is also configured to level the defence battlefield with India. Ironically, instead of being a conventional deterrent, the F-16 could instead be used to carry nuclear warheads.

Expressing apprehensions over the Biden administration’s decision to upgrade Pakistan’s F-16 fleet, India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar implied that the primary use of the aircraft would be to wage war with India. Jaishankar’s concerns are not without merit. Tensions between Pakistan and India ignited in February 2019, after the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist group carried out a suicide bombing in Jammu and Kashmir that killed 40 Indian security personnel.

Pakistan had deployed F-16s against India as opposed to the Chinese-built JF-17 Thunder that they initially claimed to have used, violating the terms of sale from the United States. (ANI)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

There will be famines and earthquakes: Matthew 24

Indonesia: Java quake kills 162 and injures hundreds

By Tessa Wong, Simon Fraser & Alys Davies

BBC News

An earthquake on the main Indonesian island of Java has killed at least 162 people and injured hundreds, regional governor Ridwan Kamil has said.

The 5.6 magnitude quake struck Cianjur town in West Java, at a shallow depth of 10km (six miles), according to US Geological Survey data.

Scores of people were taken to hospital, with many treated outside.

Rescuers were working into the night to try to save others thought to still be trapped under collapsed buildings.

The area where the quake struck is densely populated and prone to landslides, with poorly built houses reduced to rubble in many areas.

Earlier, Indonesia’s National Disaster Mitigation Agency (BNPB) said at least 62 people had died, according to the latest available data.

Speaking to local media, Mr Kamil said some 326 people had been injured in the quake, noting that “most of them sustained fractures from being crushed in ruins”.

But he warned some residents remained “trapped in isolated places” and said officials were “under the assumption that the number of injured and deaths will rise with time”.

The West Java governor added that more than 13,000 people had been displaced by the disaster, and the BNPB said over 2,200 homes had been damaged by the quake.

Herman Suherman, the head of administration in Cianjur town, said most injuries were bone fractures sustained from people being trapped by debris in buildings.

“The ambulances keep on coming from the villages to the hospital,” he was quoted by AFP news agency as saying earlier in the day. “There are many families in villages that have not been evacuated.”

Many of the injured were treated outside in a hospital car park after the hospital was left without power for several hours following the quake, West Java’s governor said.

The tremor could also be felt in the capital Jakarta about 100km away, where people in high-rise buildings were evacuated.

Office workers rushed out of buildings in the civic and business district during the tremor, which started at 13:21 Western Indonesian time (WIT) on Monday, the agency said.

“I was working when the floor under me was shaking. I could feel the tremor clearly. I tried to do nothing to process what it was, but it became even stronger and lasted for some time,” lawyer Mayadita Waluyo told AFP.

An office worker named Ahmad Ridwan told news agency Reuters: “We are used to this [earthquakes] in Jakarta, but people were so nervous just now, so we also panicked.”

Earthquakes are common in Indonesia, which sits on the “ring of fire” area of tectonic activity in the Pacific. The country has a history of devastating earthquakes and tsunamis, with more than 2,000 killed in a 2018 Sulawesi quake.

The Iranian Horn Promises a Nuclear Response: Daniel 8

Iran Promises ‘Firm Answer’ As Nuclear Rhetoric Sharpens

Sunday, 11/20/20223 minutes

Author: Iran International Newsroom

Elections in the United States and Israel have further dimmed prospects for reviving the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, with some analysts now proclaiming it dead.

Mohammad Eslami, a vice-President and head of the Atomic Energy Agency of Iran, promised Saturday a “firm answer” to Thursday’s United States-sponsored resolution censuring Tehran at the governing board of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Speaking in Esfahan, Eslami evoked the “self-sacrifice” of the 23,000 “martyrs” from the province who died in the 1980-88 war with Iraq.

This was not the only talk this week of war. In a piece headlined ‘The Post Iran nuclear deal world won’t be pretty’ in the influential US magazine Foreign Policy, columnist Anchal Vohra suggested the US, or “the West,” could “even consider direct military intervention” to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Short of that, Vohra wrote, US might be “accelerating” supply to Israel of refueling tankers and other equipment that could assist an Israel strike on Iran.

Incoming Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government will include members of the Religious Zionism party, will inherit developed plans for attacking Iran, outgoing defense minister Benny Gantz said November 9. Recent reports have suggested the US is opposing the appointment of Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich to the defense portfolio.

Vohra’s Foreign Policy analysis, which drew on one published by Iran International in September, suggested that steps to pressure Iran, as military preparations were made, might include greater efforts on penalizing Chinese entities importing Iranian oil and petroleum products.

But in an informal survey of analysts, Vohra found little expectation that such steps would change Iran’s approach to the talks, which began April 2021, to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). Tehran has drawn ‘red lines’ that it shows no sign of erasing. These include ‘guarantees’ of economic measures to cushion Iran against the US later leaving a revised agreement, and insisting that the International Atomic Energy drop enquiries into uranium traces found in sites linked to Iran’s nuclear work before 2003.

JCPOA: dead or comatose?

The US argument that such ‘red lines’ go beyond the JCPOA left the analysts surveyed by Vohra divided as the whether the JCPOA was dead or comatose. “While in a deep coma…none of the parties wants to declare it dead, which would be an admission of foreign-policy failure,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, associate fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “It is hard to imagine that the deal could be restored,” said Ali Vaez, senior advisor at the International Crisis Group.

Ali Vaez, a senior advisor at the International Crisis Group

While President Joe Biden maintains his intention is to work diplomatically to revive the JCPOA – and that he is continuing ‘maximum pressure’ sanctions purely to that end – the Republican Party’s capture of the House of Representatives after the November 8 elections may well see growing Congressional opposition to the 2015 agreement, especially with so much focus on current protests in Iran and on Tehran’s supply of military drones used by Russia in Ukraine.

Vohra suggested that both the US and Iran may feel their leverage is growing. Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi told the United Nations General Assembly in September that Tehran had neutralized ‘maximum pressure’ in many cases. Some Iranian analysts also argue that looming energy shortages due to curbs on Russian exports may incentivize European states to seek JCPOA revival as a way to lift sanctions on Iran’s crude oil.

‘Threat to Europe’

But the European signatories of the JCPOA – France, Germany, and the United Kingdom – as well as the European Union, which has chaired JCPOA revivals talks, are showing greater affinity with the US and a growing reluctance to deal diplomatically with a Tehran linked closer to Russia. Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, Friday played down the challenge over energy supplies while arguing that Iran’s “weapons proliferation” was a threat to Europe. 

“It took us too long to understand a very simple fact that while we work to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, we must also focus on other forms of weapons proliferation, from drones to ballistic missiles,” she said. “It is a security risk not just for the Middle East, but for us all.”

IAEA helpless against Tehran’s nuclear activities

Iran’s atomic chief says IAEA aware of Tehran’s nuclear activities

Iran’s atomic chief says IAEA aware of Tehran’s nuclear activities

TEHRAN (RAHNUMA): The UN nuclear watchdog is aware of all of Iran’s activities, the head of country’s atomic energy organization said on Friday, a day after the atomic agency’s Board of Governors demanded explanation for traces of uranium at three undeclared sites.

The resolution, which was drafted on Thursday by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, said it was “essential and urgent” that Iran explain the origin of the uranium particles and more generally give the International Atomic Energy Agency all the answers it requires.

“Iran has not done and will not do anything that the agency is not aware of,” Mohammad Eslami, chief of Iran’s atomic energy organization was quoted as saying by the semi-official ILNA news agency.

“Our activities are all within the framework of regulations,” adding: “There is no problem about safeguards, which are the criterion of our cooperation.”

Resolution of the so-called “safeguards” investigations is critical to the UN agency, which seeks to ensure parties to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty are not secretly diverting nuclear material which they could use to make a weapon.

“They have been pressuring Iran for 20 years, but negotiations have continued,” said Eslami.

In June, Iran removed IAEA monitoring equipment including surveillance cameras installed under its 2015 deal with world powers to curb its disputed uranium enrichment program.

“The political goals of the founders of this anti-Iranian resolution will not be realized but it could impact the constructive relations between Tehran and the Agency,” Iran’s envoy to the IAEA, Mohsen Naziri, said on Thursday, according to Iran’s state media.

Even the first nuclear war would mean mass famine: Revelation 8

Even a small nuclear war would mean mass famine

Some bombs are so powerful that they could change the Earth’s climate

• Peace activists protest against nuclear weapons in front of a military base near Peer, Belgium. | REUTERS

This century’s worst-case climate scenario isn’t global warming of 4 or even 5 degrees Celsius. It’s a nuclear winter that would trigger global cooling up to 12 or 13 degrees.

That would happen within weeks of the start of a nuclear war, as smoke from burning cities blotted out the sun. The result would be a massive famine as the ocean’s food chain collapsed and global crops failed.

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In most scenarios, hunger would spread around much of the globe and kill hundreds of millions of people, said Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University and co-author of two new studies on agriculture collapse and ocean destruction. How bad it gets depends on the size of the nuclear exchange, but even a “smaller” nuclear war — say, between India and Pakistan — would cause enough global cooling to starve hundreds of millions. In a war that involved Russia and the U.S., which have more powerful weapons and larger stockpiles, the death toll would likely exceed half the world’s population.

That means any country willing to launch a first strike is willing to be a mass murderer, says Robock, and anyone willing to launch a retaliatory strike is agreeing to be a suicide bomber.

He is among a number of experts who think an aggressive posture in response to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s nuclear threats isn’t a deterrent but only puts the world in more danger. Daniel Ellsberg, the famous whistleblower who stole hundreds of pages of nuclear secrets along with the Pentagon Papers, argues the same thing in his 2017 book “The Doomsday Machine.”

The experts I spoke with say the model of deterrence and “mutually assured destruction” is based on an outdated picture and doesn’t take enough of consideration the risk of a false alarm triggering a first strike followed by escalation, or the ensuing climate catastrophe that would kill billions. Just as improved climate modeling has sharpened our knowledge of global warming, it’s also allowed researchers to better understand the catastrophic costs of nuclear winter.

Talking about annihilation on this scale can make people feel helpless, but it shouldn’t. Policy changes could drastically reduce the risk of nuclear apocalypse.

One set of measures should target global warming. That’s because climate change caused by emissions could increase the risk of nuclear war by increasing political instability. “Extreme heat, extensive droughts, terrible disasters and rising seas are creating wave after wave of challenge to societies around the world … thus affecting the social, economic and political domains of nations — and thereby influencing relations among nations,” wrote Christine Parthemore, head of the Council on Strategic Risks, in a speech for last year’s United Nations climate summit, COP26.

Another set of reforms should make current nuclear policy less threatening. A way to start would be for more countries, including the U.S., to adopt a “no first use” policy — a pledge never to use nuclear weapons except in retaliation for a nuclear strike.

Last month, the U.S. failed to adopt a such policy in the latest version of the Nuclear Posture Review, a report issued by each new president since the Clinton administration. This seems not just dangerous but immoral. Putin appeared to be threatening first use of nuclear weapons during the Ukraine invasion, a threat the world correctly found monstrous. So why would the U.S. reserve the right to start a nuclear war?

I asked Frank von Hippel of Princeton University’s department of science and global security, and he told me that although President Joe Biden has expressed a preference for a no-first-use policy, he’s getting pushback from the Pentagon and from some of our allies, “who think we shouldn’t take any options off the table.”

The problem is that the Pentagon and some of our allied leaders might not be thinking enough about the science of post-nuclear climate change. It’s based on well-accepted physics and climate modeling, and still, said Von Hippel, “the Pentagon has been dismissing this as the hobby horse of a bunch of scientists.”

Even in the absence of a no-first-use policy, the U.S. should take its land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles off what’s called hair-trigger alert. Right now, if there’s a warning of a Russian nuclear attack, the president has about 10 minutes to decide whether to strike back and thereby end the world as we know it, Von Hippel said.

That leaves the world vulnerable to a so-called accidental nuclear war — an absurd but totally plausible way to end civilization through a series of misunderstandings. We’ve come close before and the risk goes up when international tensions are high.

It’s a fallacy to equate an aggressive stance with the willingness to use nuclear weapons, said Pavel Podvig, an independent researcher in Geneva who was born in Russia and has studied nuclear security issues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and Princeton. The principle of deterrence, he said, rests on showing you have the capacity to kill more people than your opponent. But if the West tries to deter Russia this way, it needs to demonstrate the consequences of a global calamity would be worse for Russia, and that’s not likely to be the case. It goes back to Robock’s comparison to suicide bombing.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that it’s mutually assured destruction that prevents Russia’s using nuclear weapons,” he said. “I believe that it’s the fact that any use would be almost universally considered completely unacceptable.”

He said he doesn’t think Putin will employ so-called tactical weapons in Ukraine because that notion was conceived to attack large concentrations of troops, “and this is not that kind of war.” But he worries that even just talking about it is normalizing the use of nuclear weapons. “The message should be that if you use nuclear weapons, you’re in criminal territory.” The world should still take an aggressive stance, he said, but in a different way — aggressive in universally condemning the use of nuclear weapons.

Americans are starting to realize how much we should demand climate stability and decades of activist pressure is finally starting to move the needle on climate change. We should also be demanding a nuclear posture that does everything possible to prevent a nuclear threat to our atmosphere. And we should demand that our lives not be considered collateral damage in a war that can’t be won.

Faye Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the Follow the Science podcast.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will start a race for nukes: Daniel 7

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could start a race for nukes, Austin says

The Defense secretary painted a bleak picture for the world, alluding to a scenario in which autocrats will race to acquire the bomb if Russia isn’t repelled.

“They could well conclude that getting nuclear weapons would give them a hunting license of their own. And that could drive a dangerous spiral of nuclear proliferation,” the secretary said at the Halifax International Security Forum.

Austin further warned that “Putin may resort again to profoundly irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling” as the war drags on and if Ukrainian forces continue their gains against Russian troops.

The secretary said helping to defend Ukraine is in the national interest, and there’s no option but to assist in Kyiv’s fight since peace talks are unlikely any time soon.

The comments come against the backdrop of a new round of missile tests by North Korea, including a recent launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile, moves that have again raised fears that the regime in Pyongyang is increasing the range and sophistication of its nuclear-capable missile arsenal. At the same time, international efforts to revive the Iran nuclear deal have stalled, and Iran has significantly expanded its nuclear program.

Sen. Jim Risch of Idaho, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he agreed with Austin’s assessment, especially as it pertained to Iran. “If the Iranians got their hands on a nuclear weapon, there’s going to be a stampede of countries in the Middle East and other parts of the world that think they’ve got to have nuclear weapons to respond,” he said. “That is not a small concern. That is a big concern.”

Kirby on nuclear threat: U.S. ‘has seen nothing’ to change ‘strategic deterrent posture’

There is no indication that Ukraine is ready for negotiations with Russia, even as Russian forces pull back in Ukraine’s south and Russian missile strikes pound civilian infrastructure throughout the country, turning off the lights, heat and water in Kyiv and other major cities.