Economic Consequences of the Sixth Seal (Revelation 6:12)

Scenario Earthquakes for Urban Areas Along the Atlantic Seaboard of the United States

NYCEM.org

New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation

If today a magnitude 6 earthquake were to occur centered on New York City, what would its effects be? Will the loss be 10 or 100 billion dollars? Will there be 10 or 10,000 fatalities? Will there be 1,000 or 100,000 homeless needing shelter? Can government function, provide assistance, and maintain order?

At this time, no satisfactory answers to these questions are available. A few years ago, rudimentary scenario studies were made for Boston and New York with limited scope and uncertain results. For most eastern cities, including Washington D.C., we know even less about the economic, societal and political impacts from significant earthquakes, whatever their rate of occurrence.

Why do we know so little about such vital public issues? Because the public has been lulled into believing that seriously damaging quakes are so unlikely in the east that in essence we do not need to consider them. We shall examine the validity of this widely held opinion.

Is the public’s earthquake awareness (or lack thereof) controlled by perceived low Seismicity, SeismicHazard, or SeismicRisk? How do these three seismic features differ from, and relate to each other? In many portions of California, earthquake awareness is refreshed in a major way about once every decade (and in some places even more often) by virtually every person experiencing a damaging event. The occurrence of earthquakes of given magnitudes in time and space, not withstanding their effects, are the manifestations of seismicity. Ground shaking, faulting, landslides or soil liquefaction are the manifestations of seismic hazard. Damage to structures, and loss of life, limb, material assets, business and services are the manifestations of seismic risk. By sheer experience, California’s public understands fairly well these three interconnected manifestations of the earthquake phenomenon. This awareness is reflected in public policy, enforcement of seismic regulations, and preparedness in both the public and private sector. In the eastern U.S., the public and its decision makers generally do not understand them because of inexperience. Judging seismic risk by rates of seismicity alone (which are low in the east but high in the west) has undoubtedly contributed to the public’s tendency to belittle the seismic loss potential for eastern urban regions.

Let us compare two hypothetical locations, one in California and one in New York City. Assume the location in California does experience, on average, one M = 6 every 10 years, compared to New York once every 1,000 years. This implies a ratio of rates of seismicity of 100:1. Does that mean the ratio of expected losses (when annualized per year) is also 100:1? Most likely not. That ratio may be closer to 10:1, which seems to imply that taking our clues from seismicity alone may lead to an underestimation of the potential seismic risks in the east. Why should this be so?

To check the assertion, let us make a back-of-the-envelope estimate. The expected seismic risk for a given area is defined as the area-integrated product of: seismic hazard (expected shaking level), assets ($ and people), and the assets’ vulnerabilities (that is, their expected fractional loss given a certain hazard – say, shaking level). Thus, if we have a 100 times lower seismicity rate in New York compared to California, which at any given point from a given quake may yield a 2 times higher shaking level in New York compared to California because ground motions in the east are known to differ from those in the west; and if we have a 2 times higher asset density (a modest assumption for Manhattan!), and a 2 times higher vulnerability (again a modest assumption when considering the large stock of unreinforced masonry buildings and aged infrastructure in New York), then our California/New York ratio for annualized loss potential may be on the order of (100/(2x2x2)):1. That implies about a 12:1 risk ratio between the California and New York location, compared to a 100:1 ratio in seismicity rates.

From this example it appears that seismic awareness in the east may be more controlled by the rate of seismicity than by the less well understood risk potential. This misunderstanding is one of the reasons why earthquake awareness and preparedness in the densely populated east is so disproportionally low relative to its seismic loss potential. Rare but potentially catastrophic losses in the east compete in attention with more frequent moderate losses in the west. New York City is the paramount example of a low-probability, high-impact seismic risk, the sort of risk that is hard to insure against, or mobilize public action to reduce the risks.

There are basically two ways to respond. One is to do little and wait until one or more disastrous events occur. Then react to these – albeit disastrous – “windows of opportunity.” That is, pay after the unmitigated facts, rather than attempt to control their outcome. This is a high-stakes approach, considering the evolved state of the economy. The other approach is to invest in mitigation ahead of time, and use scientific knowledge and inference, education, technology transfer, and combine it with a mixture of regulatory and/or economic incentives to implement earthquake preparedness. The National Earthquake Hazard Reduction Program (NEHRP) has attempted the latter while much of the public tends to cling to the former of the two options. Realistic and reliable quantitative loss estimation techniques are essential to evaluate the relative merits of the two approaches.

This paper tries to bring into focus some of the seismological factors which are but one set of variables one needs for quantifying the earthquake loss potential in eastern U.S. urban regions. We use local and global analogs for illustrating possible scenario events in terms of risk. We also highlight some of the few local steps that have been undertaken towards mitigating against the eastern earthquake threat; and discuss priorities for future actions.

The Chinese Horn Triple Her Nuclear Horn: Daniel 7

Pentagon: China to more than triple its nuclear arsenal by 2035

Yet the total is still a fraction of America’s and Russia’s stockpiles.

Visitors tour past Chinese military vehicles carrying the Dong Feng 41 and DF-17 ballistic missiles at an exhibition in Beijing, Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022. | Andy Wong/AP Photo

By LARA SELIGMAN

11/29/2022 11:53 AM EST

China is continuing to steadily expand its nuclear arsenal and could have 1,500 warheads by 2035, according to a new Defense Department study released on Tuesday.

Beijing’s current nuclear stockpile has surpassed 400 warheads, the Pentagon warned in its annual report to Congress on China’s military might. By 2035, officials expect the People’s Liberation Army to complete the modernization of its military forces.

The latest numbers show that China is on pace with the recent Pentagon estimates, according to a senior DoD official, who requested anonymity to discuss the report ahead of its release. As of January, the independent Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimated that China had 350 nuclear warheads; last year, DoD estimated that China would reach 1,000 nuclear warheads by 2030.

While the latest report does not reflect an acceleration from last year’s pace of growth, China’s nuclear buildup over the past few years is a “dramatic acceleration” from the mid-2000s, the official said.

“This is an accelerating trend,” the official said. “We see that with the buildout of the silo fields, the creation of a nuclear triad, what they’re doing with their sea bases and air components as well as the silos and their land mobile forces.”

Beijing’s arsenal is still a fraction of the size of Russia’s and the United States’, which together account for 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. As of January, Russia led the pack with 5,977 nuclear warheads; the United States was a close second with 5,428, according to SIPRI.

Washington’s and Moscow’s nuclear forces are limited by the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, which the two countries agreed in 2021 to extend for five years. Russia on Monday postponed scheduled arms control talks with the United States set to take place this week in Cairo, with neither side giving a reason.

But China has refused to join the talks, arguing that Russia’s and the United States’ arsenals are much larger than its own and the two nuclear superpowers’ have primary responsibility for arms control. But Beijing’s expansion “raises some questions about their intent,” the senior DoD official said.

China’s expanding nuclear arsenal to preempt the Australian Nuclear Horn: Daniel 7

China will likely have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if it continues with its current nuclear buildup pace, according to a report released by the Pentagon on Nov 29. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)

China’s expanding nuclear arsenal to preempt ‘hostile activities’ in region: Analyst

China will likely have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if it continues with its current nuclear buildup pace, according to a report by the Pentagon. 

Calvin Yang

30 Nov 2022 07:20PM(Updated: 30 Nov 2022 08:36PM)

SINGAPORE: Concerned with various alliances forming in its backyard, China may take on a more offensive nuclear posture, said a defence analyst on Wednesday (Nov 30).

Beijing “has to adopt a more offensive stance with regards to the use of its nuclear weapons”, as the geostrategic environment around China continues to change dramatically, said Mr Ridzwan Rahmat, principal defence analyst at defence intelligence company Janes.

According to a report out of the United States, China will likely have a stockpile of 1,500 nuclear warheads by 2035 if it continues with its current nuclear buildup pace. 

The figures released by the Pentagon on Tuesday underscore mounting concerns over China’s intentions for its expanding nuclear arsenal, with a US official stating that the Asian superpower has a rapid buildup too substantial to keep under wraps. 

China is worried about the type of alliances that are currently forming in its backyard, Mr Ridzwan told CNA’s Asia Now.

This includes the AUKUS trilateral security pact between Australia, Britain and the US, which facilitates cooperation on security issues in the Indo-Pacific.

It will equip Australia with nuclear-powered submarines, which China views as a hostile move and has repeatedly criticised as an act of nuclear proliferation. 

“I think the Chinese nuclear programme has evolved, from a point where it was purely a defensive weapon to a point where it’s now being postured as a weapon to preempt any hostile activities surrounding that particular region,” said Mr Ridzwan. 

When its nuclear programme started more than 50 years ago, the preoccupation in China’s strategic calculations was the reunification with Taiwan and to ensure that its territorial sovereignty was not violated, he said. 

“The nuclear weapon was viewed, at that point of time, as something that might guarantee its survival.”

However, the dynamics have since shifted, with observers calling China’s rapid military buildup as a strategic breakout from its minimum deterrence nuclear posture. 

The Pentagon’s latest annual report on China’s military said the country currently has a nuclear stockpile of more than 400 warheads.

The estimate for 2035 was based on an unchanged pace of military buildup, a US official said after the report was released. 

CHINA TO BOOST ITS STRATEGIC DETERRENT

China had said that its arsenal is dwarfed by those of the US and Russia, and that it is ready for dialogue, but only if Washington reduces its nuclear stockpile to China’s level.

During the Communist Party Congress in October, Chinese President Xi Jinping noted that China would boost its strategic deterrent, a term typically used to describe nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon’s report reiterated concerns about mounting pressure by Beijing on Taiwan, but Washington does not see an invasion of the island as imminent.

Mr Ridzwan believes any reunification attempts with Taiwan will “probably be carried out by conventional forces rather than nuclear forces”. 

“While the Taiwan Strait crisis itself is the catalyst for China’s nuclear programme, I don’t think it will be the tool that China will deploy in the event that it needs to reunify with Taiwan by force,” he added. 

Meanwhile, South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol said earlier this week that China has what it takes to dissuade North Korea from pursuing its nuclear ambitions. 

However, Mr Ridzwan does not believe there is any interest for Beijing to curtail Pyongyang’s nuclear programme. 

He added that North Korea’s preparations for resuming the testing of nuclear weapons is going to complicate deterrence calculations for the US. 

“And from China’s point of view, any complications to the Americans will be in Beijing’s favour, given how Beijing is very concerned about the security roadblocks that have formed around its territorial areas,” he added

The Threat of Nuclear War: Revelation 16

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu attends a meeting with officials of the Defence Ministry in an unknown location, in this still image taken from video released on November 9, 2022. Russian Defence Ministry/Handout via REUTERS

Russia says it will focus on building nuclear arms infrastructure in 2023

Nov 30 (Reuters) – Russia will pay special attention to building infrastructure for its nuclear forces in 2023, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on Wednesday.

Shoigu said in televised comments that the Russia would also work to improve the combat capabilities of its missile forces and that facilities were being built to accommodate new missile systems. Russia has the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world, with close to 6,000 warheads.

President Vladimir Putin has placed territory seized by Russia in Ukraine under Moscow’s nuclear umbrella, warning that he is ready to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity” by all available means. The United States says it has warned Russia over the consequences of any use of nuclear weapons.

Russia and the United States were due to hold talks in Cairo this week on their existing New START treaty, which limits the number of warheads each can deploy.

Predicting the Sixth Seal in New York: Revelation 6

A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region.

By Ben McGrath

November 28, 2022

Illustration by João Fazenda

Every now and then, the ground trembles, in some places more often and more dramatically than in others. New York is no California. Still, Brooklyn chimneys toppled and windows shattered in the summer of 1884, when a quake struck near Coney Island: magnitude 5, or thereabouts. (Seismometers were not then in wide circulation.) Anything larger, amid today’s infrastructure, would cause quite a bit of damage. But we have scant records about how frequently such a quake occurs. “Every thousand years, every ten thousand years, every million years?,” William Menke, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty observatory, wondered recently, with the potential destruction of the metropolitan region in mind. “It makes a difference!” Many major earthquakes have occurred on the East Coast, he explained. We just don’t know when.

Menke was hiking up a mountain in Harriman State Park, beside the Ramapo Fault, to try to fill in the gaps. He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread. “That was the one that started me thinking about this,” he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. “That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.” A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. “Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,” Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious.

The two continued climbing, in search of ever more precariously perched boulders. Some were too small to rule out human intervention. “You can see somebody moved those hefty rocks into a bench configuration,” Menke noted of one arrangement, near the remains of a campfire. Another boulder, intriguingly top-heavy, sat in a crack, making it harder to dislodge, and therefore unworthy of scrutiny. Menke crouched beside others to sketch their contours in a notebook and measure the slopes of the underlying bedrock, using a carpenter’s level and an inclinometer, for which he’d paid eight dollars at Lowe’s. “Most of the stuff I do is pretty low tech,” he said. “I have occasionally lost things in the field and then found them six months later, a little rusty.”

Menke’s gray hair was untrimmed and, like some of the stones he examined, in seeming defiance of gravity. His fixation on the geology was such that he failed to notice a buck galloping past, though he called attention to a small discoloration in the bedrock at one point. “See the surface here? Something was protecting this from erosion. Was there a boulder there that rolled off? Where is it?” Using some back-of-the-envelope physics, he estimated the amount of gravitational acceleration required to send various candidates in his notebook sliding downhill. “The last one we did was on a more gentle slope, and it was about point three of gravity,” he said. “So that would be about a seven-and-a-half magnitude.” By contrast, a giant sea-turtle-shaped rock on a steeper slope seemed likely to ski with a magnitude 7. “So that, actually, is an interesting number,” Menke said. “If you can rule out that there have been any earthquakes of magnitude 7 since the end of the Ice Age, that actually is pretty important in terms of New York’s seismic risk.”

Proper science would require his following up with sophisticated camera technology, for photogrammetry and 3-D computer modelling. “I’ll tell you a funny story about a Greek dude,” Menke said, referring to the astronomer Aristarchus, who attempted to estimate the distance from the earth to the sun. “He did a pretty good job, but there was a critical piece of info he needed to know, and that was the angular diameter of the sun. It’s half a degree, and he guessed that it was two degrees. Had he been careful to measure things, he would have gotten the right number.” For now, though, Menke took comfort in what the naked eye was telling him. Then again, a magnitude 7 earthquake is a thousand times more powerful than a magnitude 5. Think of Haiti in 2010, instead of Coney Island in 1884.

Pausing for a water break before beginning his descent, Menke ran his hand over another boulder and broke off a piece of crusty rock tripe, or lichen. “Very low nutritional value,” he said. “But if faced with a choice between eating rock tripe and dying, you eat rock tripe.” ♦Published in the print edition of the December 5, 2022, issue, with the headline “Shake It Off.”

Predicting the Earthquake That Could Wreck New York

A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region.

By Ben McGrath

November 28, 2022

Illustration by João Fazenda

Every now and then, the ground trembles, in some places more often and more dramatically than in others. New York is no California. Still, Brooklyn chimneys toppled and windows shattered in the summer of 1884, when a quake struck near Coney Island: magnitude 5, or thereabouts. (Seismometers were not then in wide circulation.) Anything larger, amid today’s infrastructure, would cause quite a bit of damage. But we have scant records about how frequently such a quake occurs. “Every thousand years, every ten thousand years, every million years?,” William Menke, a seismologist at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty observatory, wondered recently, with the potential destruction of the metropolitan region in mind. “It makes a difference!” Many major earthquakes have occurred on the East Coast, he explained. We just don’t know when.

Menke was hiking up a mountain in Harriman State Park, beside the Ramapo Fault, to try to fill in the gaps. He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread. “That was the one that started me thinking about this,” he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. “That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.” A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. “Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,” Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious.

The two continued climbing, in search of ever more precariously perched boulders. Some were too small to rule out human intervention. “You can see somebody moved those hefty rocks into a bench configuration,” Menke noted of one arrangement, near the remains of a campfire. Another boulder, intriguingly top-heavy, sat in a crack, making it harder to dislodge, and therefore unworthy of scrutiny. Menke crouched beside others to sketch their contours in a notebook and measure the slopes of the underlying bedrock, using a carpenter’s level and an inclinometer, for which he’d paid eight dollars at Lowe’s. “Most of the stuff I do is pretty low tech,” he said. “I have occasionally lost things in the field and then found them six months later, a little rusty.”

Menke’s gray hair was untrimmed and, like some of the stones he examined, in seeming defiance of gravity. His fixation on the geology was such that he failed to notice a buck galloping past, though he called attention to a small discoloration in the bedrock at one point. “See the surface here? Something was protecting this from erosion. Was there a boulder there that rolled off? Where is it?” Using some back-of-the-envelope physics, he estimated the amount of gravitational acceleration required to send various candidates in his notebook sliding downhill. “The last one we did was on a more gentle slope, and it was about point three of gravity,” he said. “So that would be about a seven-and-a-half magnitude.” By contrast, a giant sea-turtle-shaped rock on a steeper slope seemed likely to ski with a magnitude 7. “So that, actually, is an interesting number,” Menke said. “If you can rule out that there have been any earthquakes of magnitude 7 since the end of the Ice Age, that actually is pretty important in terms of New York’s seismic risk.”

Proper science would require his following up with sophisticated camera technology, for photogrammetry and 3-D computer modelling. “I’ll tell you a funny story about a Greek dude,” Menke said, referring to the astronomer Aristarchus, who attempted to estimate the distance from the earth to the sun. “He did a pretty good job, but there was a critical piece of info he needed to know, and that was the angular diameter of the sun. It’s half a degree, and he guessed that it was two degrees. Had he been careful to measure things, he would have gotten the right number.” For now, though, Menke took comfort in what the naked eye was telling him. Then again, a magnitude 7 earthquake is a thousand times more powerful than a magnitude 5. Think of Haiti in 2010, instead of Coney Island in 1884.

Pausing for a water break before beginning his descent, Menke ran his hand over another boulder and broke off a piece of crusty rock tripe, or lichen. “Very low nutritional value,” he said. “But if faced with a choice between eating rock tripe and dying, you eat rock tripe.” ♦Published in the print edition of the December 5, 2022, issue, with the headline “Shake It Off.”

Obama nuclear deal talks at ‘dead end’: Daniel 8

Iran nuclear deal talks at ‘dead end’

November 29, 2022 at 4:04 pm | Published in: Asia & Americas, Iran, Middle East, News, US

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Nasser Kanaani [@IRIMFA_EN/Twitter]November 29, 2022 at 4:04 pm

A spokesman for the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nasser Kanaani, said the negotiations over the Iranian nuclear program have reached a “dead end”, adding that Europe has failed to fulfil its obligations as stipulated in the nuclear agreement.

“It seems that we have reached a dead end in the negotiations of the nuclear agreement,” Kanaani told reporters on Monday.

Commenting on the UN Human Rights Council decision, last Thursday, to form a high-level fact- finding investigation into the Iranian authorities’ crackdown on protesters following the death of Mahsa Amini, Kanaani said, “Iran will not cooperate with the political committee called the Fact-Finding Commission”.

“The hasty use of human rights mechanisms and the use of these mechanisms as a tool against independent states is unacceptable and condemnable, and does not contribute to the advancement of human rights,” Kanaani said.

“There is no doubt that Western governments, especially the US government and some governments allied with it, have played a role in provoking the riots inside Iran, and this information was presented to the ambassadors residing in Tehran in various frameworks, and a large number of citizens from different countries were also arrested for their role in inciting riots,” he added.

Regarding the attack on the Israeli oil tanker, Kanaani said, “Making false accusations against Iran is a goal that the Israeli Occupation and its allies seek to achieve. If Iran does something, it is brave enough to bear its responsibility.”

More than 300 Dead By the Iranian Horn

Iranian General Acknowledges Over 300 Dead in Ongoing Unrest

Associated Press | November 28, 2022 3:02 pm

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — An Iranian general on Monday acknowledged that more than 300 people have been killed in the unrest surrounding nationwide protests, giving the first official word on casualties in two months.

That estimate is considerably lower than the toll reported by Human Rights Activists in Iran, a U.S.-based group that has been closely tracking the protests since they erupted after the Sept. 16 death of a young woman being held by the country’s morality police.

The activist group says 451 protesters and 60 security forces have been killed since the start of the unrest and that more than 18,000 people have been detained.

The protests were sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was detained for allegedly violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code. They quickly escalated into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s theocracy and pose one of the most serious challenges to the ruling clerics since the 1979 revolution that brought them to power.

Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, the commander of the aerospace division of the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, was quoted by a website close to the Guard as saying that more than 300 people have been killed, including “martyrs,” an apparent reference to security forces. He also suggested that many of those killed were ordinary Iranians not involved in the protests.

He did not provide an exact figure or say where his estimate came from.

Authorities have heavily restricted media coverage of the protests. State-linked media have not reported an overall toll and have largely focused on attacks on security forces, which officials blame on shadowy militant and separatist groups.

Hajizadeh reiterated the official claim that the protests have been fomented by Iran’s enemies, including Western countries and Saudi Arabia, without providing evidence. The protesters say they are fed up after decades of social and political repression, and deny having any foreign agenda.

The protests have spread across the country and drawn support from artists, athletes and other public figures. The unrest has even cast a shadow over the World Cup, with some Iranians actively rooting against their own national team because they see it as being linked to the government.

The niece of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently called on people to pressure their governments to cut ties with Tehran over its violent suppression of the demonstrations.

In a video posted online by her France-based brother, Farideh Moradkhani urged “conscientious people of the world” to support Iranian protesters. The video was shared online this week after Moradkhani’s reported arrest on Nov. 23, according to the activist group.

Moradkhani is a long-time activist whose late father was an opposition figure married to Khamenei’s sister and is the closest member of the supreme leader’s family to be arrested. The branch of the family has opposed Khamenei for decades and Moradkhani has been imprisoned on previous occasions for her activism.

“I ask the conscientious people of the world to stand by us and ask their governments not to react with empty words and slogans but with real action and stop any dealings with this regime,” she said in her video statement.

The protests, now in their third month, have continued despite a brutal crackdown by Iranian security forces using live ammunition, rubber bullets and tear gas.

Iran refuses to cooperate with a fact-finding mission that the U.N. Human Rights Council recently voted to establish.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will not engage in any cooperation, whatsoever, with the political committee,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani said Monday.

In a separate development, Iran released a 76-year-old dual Iranian-Austrian citizen from prison for health reasons, the Austria Press Agency reported.

APA quoted the Austrian Foreign Ministry confirming that Massud Mossaheb was given indefinite medical leave. The ministry said “intensive diplomatic efforts” had led to his release, which was first reported by Austrian daily Die Presse. There was no immediate comment from Iran.

Mossaheb was arrested on suspicion of espionage in early 2019 during a visit to the capital, Tehran, and later sentenced to 10 years in prison. He must remain in Iran and report to authorities every other week, APA reported.

Iran has detained several dual nationals in recent years on charges of threatening national security. Analysts and rights groups accuse hard-liners in Iran’s security agencies of using foreign detainees as bargaining chips in negotiations or prisoner swaps with the West, which Tehran denies.