This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
“The problem here comes from many subtle faults,” explained Skyes after the study was published.
He adds: “We now see there is earthquake activity on them. Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting with members of the Security Council in Moscow on Friday. Amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, Putin’s friend, Viktor Medvedchuk, recently predicted that a nuclear strike will “most likely”… MorePAVEL BYRKIN/POOL/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Putin and senior Russian officials have repeatedly threatened nuclear escalation against Kyiv and its Western partners since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Western nations, Putin added, “must realize that we also have weapons that can hit targets on their territory. All this really threatens a conflict with the use of nuclear weapons and the destruction of civilization. Don’t they get that?”
However, Macron appears to have walked back his previous comments earlier this month about sending troops to Ukraine. During an interview with Czech news publication Novinky.cz. Macron emphasized that France is not actively considering sending military forces to Ukraine.
“In response to one question I was asked about sending troops, I said that nothing is out of the question,” he recalled. “This does not mean that we are considering the possibility of sending French troops to Ukraine in the near future, but we are starting discussions and thinking about everything that can be done to support Ukraine, especially on Ukrainian territory.”
On Friday, according to Russian news agency Tass, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Medvedchuk who was exiled to Russia in 2022 in exchange for Ukrainian prisoners of war predicted that a nuclear strike will “most likely” be coming as the West continues to “assert its right to global dominance.”
“If the collective West continues to assert its right to global dominance, Ukraine’s human capital will not be enough in any case…If we continue the policy of war to the bitter end, sooner or later foreign troops will have to be introduced. And most likely, [we will be] looking at a nuclear strike eventually,” he said.
However, Medvedchuk does not rule out that countries outside of Europe could become involved if the conflict expands. “It is clear that the Arab world is being drawn into the war, and after that, China and India will also be involved, as they do not have issues with soldiers.”
Newsweek has reached out to the Russian defense ministry via email for comment.
However, Putin and the Kremlin have long framed its war on Ukraine as a preemptive war on the “collective West.”
“The West miscalculated and ran into the firm position and determination of our multinational people,” Putin told government officials, members of parliament, and leading civil society figures during his annual speech.
Meanwhile, NATO leaders—particularly on the alliance’s long frontier with Russia—are increasingly warning that direct conflict with Moscow is a realistic danger, suggesting the West has between three and 10 years to prepare for war. However, Putin described such warnings as “nonsense.”
“At the same time they themselves are choosing targets for striking our territory,” the Russian leader said referring to Scholz’s revelation that British and French personnel are helping Ukraine target Russian positions with Storm Shadow/SCALP cruise missiles.
Natalie Venegas is a Weekend Reporter at Newsweek based in New York. Her focus is reporting on education, social justice issues, healthcare, crime and politics while specializing on marginalized and underrepresented communities. Before joining Newsweek in 2023, Natalie worked with news publications including Adweek, Al Día and Austin Monthly Magazine. She is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin with a bachelor’s in journalism. You can get in touch with Natalie by emailing n.venegas@newsweek.com
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts staying at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which is temporarily occupied by Russian forces, have heard the sounds of explosions directly on the territory of the plant.
Details: The sounds of explosions were likely caused by outgoing artillery fire from the plant site.
Representatives of the mission also heard small arms fire several times, and an air-raid warning was issued at the site.
The IAEA team has therefore postponed a planned visit to the ZNPP dry cask storage facility to a later date.
The IAEA also noted that it has still not gained access to all the areas that are important for nuclear safety.
Background: The IAEA experts working at the ZNPP have been unable to access all areas of the plant to verify information concerning the presence of Russian military equipment in one of the plant’s turbine halls.
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) experts staying at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which is temporarily occupied by Russian forces, have heard the sounds of explosions directly on the territory of the plant.
Source: press service of Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear energy regulator, citing an IAEA report
Details: The sounds of explosions were likely caused by outgoing artillery fire from the plant site.
Representatives of the mission also heard small arms fire several times, and an air-raid warning was issued at the site.
The IAEA team has therefore postponed a planned visit to the ZNPP dry cask storage facility to a later date.
The IAEA also noted that it has still not gained access to all the areas that are important for nuclear safety.
Background: The IAEA experts working at the ZNPP have been unable to access all areas of the plant to verify information concerning the presence of Russian military equipment in one of the plant’s turbine halls.
Amid warnings of “imminent” famine in the enclave, humanitarian officials say Israel is obstructing the entry and distribution of aid. Israel denies this.
RAFAH, Egypt — Hundreds of trucks loaded with food and medical aid sat idle on the roads heading into Gaza recently as a senior humanitarian official accused the Israeli government of blocking lifesaving supplies from reaching the devastated enclave.
“They limit the number of trucks that can pass,” Mohamed Nossair, head of operations at the Egyptian Red Crescent, said of Israeli officials and soldiers charged with inspecting aid destined for Gaza. “The problem is also they reject these items … that are very essential.”
Oxygen canisters, water filters, metal forks, over-the-counter painkillers and generators were among the items that Nossair said had prevented trucks from entering Gaza, where a vast majority of the people are displaced and more than 32,000 have been killed, according to local health officials.
“If I have a truck with rejected items, they reject all the truck,” Nossair said during an interview with NBC News.
On Thursday, the United Nations’ highest court reinforced Nossair’s statements, ordering Israel to open more land crossings to allow food, water, fuel and other supplies into Gaza.
Israeli officials have been imposing an opaque and cumbersome process and worsening the dire humanitarian crisis in the strip, Nossair and other aid officials charge. These accusations, which come amid warnings of an “imminent” famine inside Gaza, have brought increased criticism of Israel’s government and triggered a blame game with aid agencies.
Israeli officials have repeatedly denied obstructing aid from entering Gaza, and instead blame the U.N. for acute shortages of lifesaving supplies in the strip — particularly the north.
Members of an NBC News team in Rafah saw hundreds of vehicles on the road, as well as some in a parking area and more at a tunnel crossing in Ismailia, roughly three hours and 125 miles from the border crossing. Satellite images from the last week also show trucks on the road and parked near the crossing.
According to Nossair, at the time, roughly 100 to 120 trucks enter Gaza per day — about half the number able to be processed by Israel, and a fraction of prewar levels. In recent days, the number of aid trucks ticked up to around 190. (Aid agencies and the U.N. say Gaza needs between 500 and 600 trucks a day carrying both humanitarian aid and commercial goods.)
Unclear restrictions imposed by Israel have resulted in an average of 20 to 25 trucks turned away every day, about a fifth of the number that end up crossing into Gaza, he said.
Supplies taken in wooden crates are rejected outright regardless of what is inside, Nossair said. If pallets of aid don’t fit the exact dimensions approved by the Israeli government, he says, those trucks are also rejected.
The Israeli government agency responsible for allowing aid into Gaza, Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories, or COGAT, told NBC News that 99% of the aid trucks are approved after being screened.
“The State of Israel will continue facilitating humanitarian solutions for the Gaza Strip, however, it has no intention to compromise in any way when it comes to its citizens’ security,” the department said in a statement to NBC News.
Egyptian Red Crescent trucks loaded with aid queue outside the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip on March 23.Khaled Desouki / AFP – Getty Images
A recent NBC News request for permission to travel to the Kerem Shalom border crossing to report on this story has been refused by Israeli officials. Both Kerem Shalom and Rafah in Egypt are restricted areas that require permission to access.
Israeli officials have also blamed the U.N.’s Palestinian refugee agency (UNRWA) for a failure to distribute aid. According to COGAT, UNRWA has not requested convoys north for six weeks.
A representative for UNRWA did not respond to a request for comment on the allegation.
UNRWA, meanwhile, also accuses Israel of obstructing aid efforts by rejecting convoys and turning away trucks for carrying items such as scissors included in medical kits.
Sometimes the issue is not the item itself, but what it is stored in, Nossair said.
For example, he said, Israeli officials have turned back insulin because it is kept in freezers.
COGAT has a list of what it considers “dual-use” items that are subject to stricter scrutiny, which mostly include chemical products, cement, metal and construction items. The list does not include coolers, painkillers, anesthetics or medical equipment, yet Nossair said everything from anesthesia to paracetamol is rejected.
Dual-use items are not under a blanket prohibition, COGAT said.
“They are subjected to security screening, since the Hamas terrorist organization cynically uses these means for the advancement of its terrorist objectives,” COGAT said in a statement when asked why certain items, and thus whole truckloads of aid, were sometimes denied entry and sometimes not.
Distribution of aid within Gaza is also a struggle, particularly in the northern area of the strip, where aid has been inconsistent. The World Food Programme has described convoy journeys to the north as dangerous due to desperate crowds and checkpoint delays that often leave teams open to violence. And even when convoys do make it to the area, they can be denied access by the Israeli military.
UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini said Sunday that Israel will no longer approve the agency’s convoys to travel to the northern area of Gaza.
“This is outrageous & makes it intentional to obstruct lifesaving assistance during a man made famine,” Lazzarini said in a post on X. “These restrictions must be lifted.”
COGAT responded to Lazzarini on social media, saying Israel facilitated more than 350 trucks of aid to northern Gaza in the last month. It also invoked Israel’s allegations that UNRWA workers had ties to terrorism.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification initiative, or IPC, released a report earlier this month warning that “famine is imminent,” particularly in northern Gaza, where the first deaths due to malnutrition were reported last month. COGAT wrote in a thread on X that the information used by the IPC was outdated and that aid has significantly improved in recent weeks.
Nevertheless, the World Health Organization warned earlier this month that children were dying from the combined effects of malnutrition and disease and that Gazans will face long-term health ramifications.
“This compromises the health and well-being of an entire future generation,” the WHO said in a statement following the IPC report.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director-general, warned that famine is looming amid the bombardment of Gaza even after increased efforts to deliver aid.
“Starvation and illness continue ravaging the population,” Tedros said on X. “Immediate, concerted action is needed now.”
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Arab leaders in Cairo last week, where he said the group of diplomats agreed more needs to be done to ensure the surge of aid from recent weeks is sustained over time and that “Israel needs to do more.”
Our state institutions still talk of terrorism and refrain from openly talking of externally-driven proxy terrorism
The deadly terror strike in Bisham on March 26 that claimed the lives of five Chinese citizens delivered yet another reminder on the grim circumstances that Pakistan faces. It took the number of direct attacks involving Chinese targets to at least 33 since the launch of CPEC.
A similar attack on a bust carrying workers of Dasu Hydropower Project in the same region in July 2021 had killed nine Chinese nationals.
This alarming situation calls for deep introspection here at home.
On March 17 President Asif Ali Zardari vowed to make the terrorists accountable for the blood of each martyred jawan after attending the funeral of Lt-Col Syed Kashif Ali and Capt Muhammad Ahmed Bader, who were among five other martyrs of an attack in Mir Ali in North Waziristan the same day. “The blood of the sons of the soil would not go in vain,” he said.
The President followed this up with another resolve on March 23. “We will not tolerate any efforts by terrorists or any group to destabilise our country,” he said in his speech at the main Pakistan Day ceremony in Islamabad.
Pakistan Army’s top brass also issues such statements, often after corps commanders’ meetings to underscore its determination against terrorist threats.
Does such rhetoric fend off terrorist threat? Has it helped in any way at all? Certainly not. Four brazen attacks within 10 days – on March 17 in North Waziristan, March 20 Gwadar, March 25 Turbat, March 26 Bisham – underline the ever-evolving nature of the terrorist threat. These are among the 236 attacks this year until March 25 this year, causing at least 413 fatalities, mostly in Balochistan and Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.
This carnage has been going on for several years , even though the Frontier Corps now has four majors general in both provinces i.e. IG FC South Balochistan, IG FC North Balochistan, IG FC South KP and IG FC North KP. Despite the expansion of security forces, the incidence of terrorism has been on the rise since late 2022.
What is the clear lesson to be drawn?
Firstly, it is proxy terrorism, and no quest for sharia. Nor are any adjectives like ‘coward’, ‘insensitive’, ‘infidels’ used for terrorists of any value because of the proxy nature of the challenge. Geopolitically-driven actors just move by the agenda, regardless of who comes their way.
Some of the instruments of this cold-blooded proxy terrorism include the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) Tehreek-e-Jihad Pakistan (TJP), Islamic State of Khorasan Province (ISKP), Ahrarul-Hind, Ansarul Jihad (AuJ), Majlis-e-Askari, Jaish-e-Fursan-e-Muhammad, Jabhat al-Junud al-Mahdi (headed by Amir Sufiyan) and Hafiz Gul Bahdaur’s Jabhat Ansar al-Mahdi Khorasan (JAMK), besides Jundullah, Baloch Liberation Front (BLF) and Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and the Sindhudesh People’s Army.
They all claim to be vying for a caliphate, using Islam/sharia as a justification for their violent actions. But in reality they are agents of terrorism, instability and uncertainty. Franchises with different names on the same mission – of destabilising the region – threaten Pakistani interests, demoralise the security apparatus by pricking it here and there and scare Chinese economic engagement away from the region.
Any religious currency to these outfits amounts to naivety. The Bisham incident and the brazen attack on the Gwadar Port Authority Complex on March 20 leave little doubt on the intensions of this terror campaign.
Secondly, this proxy terrorism draws its oxygen from our neigbourhood and the border regions, where most of the terrorists associated with the aforementioned outfits had been sheltering. While Pakistan hunted out the proponents of the Haqqani Network and their Pakistani protégés such as TTP from North Waziristan, the Afghan Taliban still appear to be reluctant in a head-on collision with TTP and its associates. By implication – even if the Afghan Taliban claim not to be supporting terrorist outfits – they do serve as the umbrella for many of the outfits based there including the TTP, ISKP, ETIM (ITP) and IMU remnants.
Thirdly, terrorist forces also draw legitimacy from our own clouded thinking about the phenomenon. Our state institutions still talk of terrorism and apparently refrain from openly talking of externally-driven proxy terrorism. All visiting foreign dignitaries do talk of TTP or ISKP as the biggest security threat to the region and their countries. But our leaders appear to have failed in convincingly asking them one simple question: what is their assessment of the terrorist campaign? Why would members of these rag-tag armed groups kill innocent unarmed Pakistanis and Chinese, and systematically attack security forces? What is their interest in spreading fear and a sense of instability?
Fourth, will our bigwigs introspect as to whether – despite the omnipresent proxy terrorist threat – lapses and shortcomings in the management of security, particularly for the Chinese nationals, have facilitated the continuous terrorist campaign. No surprise that the Chinese demanded a thorough investigation into the attack, punishment for the perpetrators and effective measures to protect the safety of Chinese citizens.
Lastly, is the Pakistani leadership ready to finally realise and openly admit the proxy nature of the challenge both Pakistan and China are facing? A major step towards neturalising the challenge could perhaps be separating religion from politics. Strong messaging is required on the management of terrorism. Zero tolerance for any religious or religio-political group supportive of terrorist/militant outfits must be declared as the cardinal principle of new security policy. Ambiguity around militant outfits must make way for clarity on all those who represent a threat to the interests of Pakistan and its neighbours.
Published in The Express Tribune, March 30th, 2024.
The Israeli military’s raid on Gaza City’s Al-Shifa Hospital is in its 12th day. CNN reported on more allegations of abuse from Palestinians who have recently fled Al-Shifa or are still trapped there, including two malnourished teenage siblings who’ve had limbs amputated.
A hospital official in Rafah said at least 14 Palestinians were killed by an Israeli strike in the southern city, where Israel is expected to launch an offensive. More than a million displaced people have fled there amid the ongoing Israeli assault.
An Israeli delegation will travel to Qatar and Egypt in the coming days for talks on the release of hostages, according to the prime minister’s office.
Oppenheimer visits Japan in September 1960. (Credit: Photos by The Asahi Shimbun, obtained from J. Robert Oppenheimer Papers, Box 41, Library of Congress)
US theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lectures at Kyoto University on September 14, 1960 in Kyoto, Japan. Christopher Nolan’s biographical film about Oppenheimer opens on March 29, 2024 in Japan. (Credit: Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)Share
The world’s third largest movie market was curiously excluded from participating in the social, cultural, and economic excitement surrounding this award season’s most acclaimed product: director Christopher Nolan’s biographical film about physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. That ended when Universal Pictures finally decided to release Oppenheimer to theaters in Japan.
Initial impressions. Estimating how many Japanese people were killed by the atomic bombs is difficult. The grotesque and inhumane effects on the dead and the survivors are painfully easy to see, especially in Japan. During the post-war US military occupation, military officers confiscated and destroyed images of the bombings and the survivors to inhibit public discussion in both countries. Nolan’s decision to talk about numbers but exclude images that would force viewers to witness the uniquely horrific pains inflicted on the bodies of the bombed can be justifiably criticized as an equally callous and calculated act of erasure.
Recent Japanese reviews of the film echo this concern. Gaku Tsutaja, a New York-based Japanese artist who explores questions about nuclear war in a recent exhibition in Japan, questioned whether the movie deserved its awards. Tsutaja toldThe Chugogu Shimbun, a Hiroshima-based newspaper, that Nolan’s is just another “white masculine” point of view that portrays Oppenheimer as the victim while neglecting the millions of Japanese bombed and the many Americans poisoned by the first atomic weapons. Yukio Kawana, another US-based Japanese artist and a third-generation survivor of the Hiroshima bombing, chose not to watch Oppenheimer because she felt Nolan failed to live up to the artist’s moral duty to tell his story “without reinstating trauma.”
Masao Tomonaga, a retired professor of medicine from the Atomic Bomb Disease Institute at Nagasaki University and an atomic bomb survivor himself, addressed the audience after the film. He was two years old when the plutonium bomb “Fat Man” obliterated his home on August 9, 1945. While Nolan’ s decision not to show images of the terrible aftermath “may be a weakness” of the film, Tomonaga said, it did convey the scientists’ sense of shock when confronted with humanitarian consequences. Kazuhiro Maeshima, a professor of global studies from Japan’s Sophia University, told the same audience: “The film was self-reflective and critical of the atomic bombings.” Maeshima, who earned his doctorate in government and politics from the University of Maryland, saw the movie as a positive sign of changing US attitudes.
Kawasaki Akira, an activist who won the Kiyoshi Tanimoto Peace Prize for his decades-long effort to bring stories told by the survivors to youth around the world, said it was “difficult to look at” the scene in which an emotionally disjointed Oppenheimer congratulates a cheering crowd of colleagues for successfully destroying Hiroshima. He felt that “painful” moment—together with the scene of the atomic scientists gasping at the horrific images of the bombings the audience was intentionally denied—artistically succeeded in compelling viewers to imagine the horrors the survivors experienced. Kawasaki encouraged everyone in Japan to go see the film: It is “a rare opportunity for ordinary people to think about nuclear weapons.”
Oppenheimer’s first visit to Japan. In the movie, US President Harry Truman asks Oppenheimer, rhetorically: “You think anyone in Hiroshima or Nagasaki gives a shit who built the bomb?” Contemporary Japanese interest in the answer to that question may determine whether the film enjoys the same critical and financial success in Japan that it has in the rest of the world.
Japanese audiences were clearly interested in 1960, when Oppenheimer visited Japan as an honored guest of the Japan Committee for Intellectual Interchange.
The moment he arrived, Oppenheimer was greeted like a movie star with a barrage of lights and cameras. He spoke to packed public halls in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka about the relationships between scientists, government, and civil society. But the Japanese organizers, fearing controversy, kept him away from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Seven decades later, the distributors of the film in Japan seem to be adopting a similar approach in their marketing strategy: Images of the bomb have been stripped from the posters outside movie theaters and the trailers playing inside.
A Japanese reporter did manage to ask Oppenheimer in 1960 if he felt responsible for the suffering his work enabled. The enigmatic physicist answered that troubling question the same way Nolan does in his film. “I do not think coming to Japan changed my sense of anguish about my part in this whole piece of history,” he said. “Nor has it fully made me regret my responsibility for the technical success of the enterprise.”
Oppenheimer’s response seemed to help his hosts skirt the moral controversy inherent to inviting him to Japan. Maybe Nolan and the film distributors will be just as lucky in their apparent effort to keep uncomfortable discussions about Hiroshima and Nagasaki from undermining Japanese interest in the film.
During his visit, Oppenheimer was eager to impart some lessons he learned from directing the US atomic project. He told an elite gathering of Japanese scholars, artists, entrepreneurs, and officials organized by the International House in Tokyo that scientific discoveries, for good or ill, are inherently irreversible:
“There is a lot of talk about getting rid of atomic bombs. I like that talk; but we must not fool ourselves. The world is not going to be the same, no matter what we do with atomic bombs, because the knowledge of how to make them cannot be exorcized. It is there; and all our arrangements for living in a new age must bear in mind its omnipresent virtual presence, and the fact that one cannot change that.”
Earlier that same day, a young Harvard professor named Henry Kissinger, who spoke to the same International House community two days later, told the Tokyo press Japan needed tactical nuclear weapons to defend itself against a soon-to-be nuclear-armed communist China. At the time, the Eisenhower administration was making the same case to a resistant Japanese government and ramping up the numbers of “battlefield” nuclear weapons it deployed on US military bases on the island of Okinawa, which it refused to return to Japan. (The US military occupation on Okinawa only officially ended in 1971 under the Nixon administration.)
Long-term influence. The Pulitzer Prize winning biography that informed Nolan’s script claims Oppenheimer justified his post-war reluctance to build the hydrogen bomb by arguing “it would be both more economical and more effective militarily to accelerate the production of fissile materials for small, tactical nuclear weapons.”
The General Advisory Committee’s 1949 report at the center of Nolan’s drama, which purportedly documents that claim, is less definitive. But Oppenheimer’s comments on the bomb during his visit to Japan do make clear he was willing—and emotionally, intellectually, and morally able, despite his awareness of what happened to people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to continue to help the US government prepare to fight and win a nuclear war.
The cultural exchange program that brought Oppenheimer and Kissinger to Japan at a critical moment in the evolution of the security relationship between the two governments was funded by philanthropists from both countries. The intention of the program organizers was to create, through personal contact, a cross-cultural community of “leaders, creative artists and scholars” who could, according to an early International House report to the Rockefeller Foundation (its most important patron) “develop international mindedness, and frank off the record discussions on international affairs.” Nolan’s film may facilitate the same ends in a new critical moment for the US-Japan security relationship.
Suzuki Tatsujiro, a nuclear engineer with advanced degrees from Tokyo University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who served as the vice chair of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission and is the vice director of the Research Center for Nuclear Weapons Abolition at Nagasaki University, appreciated Nolan’s investigation of “the social implications of scientific innovation and the relationship between scientists and politics.” At the same time, he was disappointed the movie “did not address the responsibility of the US government decision to drop the bomb” and “ignored the voices of victims.” Together with Kawasaki, Suzuki plans to organize post-screening discussions to further public debate about nuclear weapons and their consequences in Japan.
Kawasaki thinks the movie might broaden Japanese thinking about nuclear weapons. Everyone here learns about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in school. But only a tiny percentage may know about Oppenheimer’s Jewish heritage or the US scientific race with Nazi Germany to develop the bomb. Kawasaki, however, wonders about the long-term impact of an expertly crafted American story about how and why “a powerful military nation like the United States organized scientists to build the bomb despite their moral reservations.” He worries some Japanese viewers may conclude their government needs to do the same because of a perceived threat from communist China.
No one can predict the social and political effects of influential cultural products and activities, like Nolan’s movie or the 1960 exchange program that brought Oppenheimer and Kissinger to Japan. It is difficult to hold artists and organizers responsible for the possible unintended consequences of their works. The Japan Committee for Intellectual Interchange probably did not anticipate the forum they created would one day be used to suggest it is foolish to hope for the abolition of nuclear weapons, or to make a case for using tactical nuclear weapons to defend Japan. Nolan, on the other hand, seems more self-aware about the likelihood his film might have a negative influence on the global public debate about the existential danger the bomb created.
A wake-up call? In an interview with the Bulletin published just before the film was released in the United States, Nolan confessed, “there’s a phase in which the more you know about nuclear weapons, you start to see them as more ordinary armaments.” He expressed concern about a general public acceptance Oppenheimer warned his audience in Tokyo they could not avoid. Nolan speculated the “nuclear Armageddon” his Oppenheimer imagines and conveys to Albert Einstein at the end of the movie is most likely to begin with “the use of tactical nukes leading to larger- and larger-scale conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet.”
There is a terrifyingly good chance that chain reaction will begin in East Asia. An isolated, impoverished North Korean dictator is practicing to launch his tactical nuclear weapons first to defeat powerful neighbors who despise his government and hold massive war games twice each year. South Korean and Japanese officials are lobbying willing US counterparts to get them US tactical nuclear weapons they can threaten to use first. China is building hundreds of new silos for the new nuclear-armed missiles it may place on hair-trigger alert. And the US military is practicing to respond to China’s silos by uploading stored nuclear warheads to existing US launchers as soon as the only remaining nuclear arms control agreement expires in February 2026.
Korea Diplomacy Plaza, Japan’s New Diplomacy Initiative, and the US-based Union of Concerned Scientists are jointly preparing to hold a second quadrilateral dialogue between scholars, scientists, and experts from South Korea, Japan, the United States, and China. The intent is to bring people together to create conditions that encourage their governments to act sensibly—just as it was for the cross-cultural non-governmental organization that brought Oppenheimer to Japan in 1960. There is hope, but no expectation, the release in Japan of Nolan’s award-winning film will too.
“The problem here comes from many subtle faults,” explained Skyes after the study was published.
He adds: “We now see there is earthquake activity on them. Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought.”
Updated: Mar 29, 2024 19:51 GMT – 96 seconds agoA possible earthquake might have occurred near Brockville, Ontario, Canada, in the evening of Thursday, Mar 28, 2024 at around 8.41 pm local time (GMT -4). Details of the quake (if it is one) are so far unkown until confirmed by a seismic agency, but the event was reported felt. We will update the status of the event on this page as soon as more information becomes available.
I felt this quake
29 Mar 00:54 UTC: First to report: VolcanoDiscovery after 13 minutes.
The closest larger town where the quake might have been felt is Athens, a town with 982 inhabitants in Canada, in 8.5 km (5.3 mi) distance northeast of the epicenter. People likely experienced weak shaking there. In the capital of Canada, Ottawa, 96 km (60 mi) away from the epicenter, the earthquake could not be felt. The following table shows some of the places that might have been affected (or not) by the shaking.
The Russian forces occupying the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) have restricted IAEA inspectors from accessing certain premises, including turbine halls where Russian military equipment was observed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi stated, “For more than two years now, nuclear safety and security in Ukraine has been in constant jeopardy.”
Grossi reported that the IAEA experts at the ZNPP have heard explosions daily, with some appearing to come from near the site, “presumably from outgoing artillery fire.” Social media reports and images indicate the presence of Russian troops and vehicles inside one of the ZNPP’s turbine halls.
The IAEA chief said, “The ZNPP has still not provided timely and appropriate access for the IAEA experts to all areas important to nuclear safety and security.
In particular, they do not have access to some parts of the turbine halls, the isolation gate of the ZNPP cooling pond and the 330 kV open switchyard at the nearby Zaporizhzhia Thermal Power Plant.”
US theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer lectures at Kyoto University on September 14, 1960 in Kyoto, Japan. Christopher Nolan’s biographical film about Oppenheimer opens on March 29, 2024 in Japan. (Credit: Photo by The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)Share
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