From: alim@woodman.mips.com (Ali Moayedian)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.iranian
Subject: Nuclear Bomb Testes & Earthquakes
Date: 2 Sep 92 23:57:36 GMT
Reply-To: alim@mips.com (Ali Moayedian)
Organization: Silicon Graphics, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: woodman.mips.com


I thought this article may be interesting to you, since there is a also 
a reference to the Tabas quake in it.  I think they have the date wrong 
though.  They refer to it as the 1978 Tabas quake.  I believe 1968 sounds 
more correct.


--------------------------
from PeaceNet via ACTIV-L:

/** gen.newsletter: 122.3 **/
** Written 12:48 pm  Aug 12, 1992 by sbrackman in cdp:gen.newsletter **
War and Peace Digest - Vol 2, No. 3 Aug.1992

  The War and Peace Digest is a bimonthly international newsletter on issues
  of disarmament, government secrecy, media accountability, the nuclear
  threat (from both civilian power plants and the military weapons complex),
  ecological destruction, and peaceful conflict resolution through the
  structures of the United Nations.  If you would like to be placed on our
  mailing list or receive a copy of our new information packet on nuclear
  power, contact Matthew Freedman at 32 Union Square East, New York, NY
  10003-3295 (Tel: 212-777-6626).

  Contributions are always welcome.
  All materials may be reproduced without permission.
  ___________________________________________________________________________


                          Bomb Tests and Earthquakes



   "Nuclear bomb testing has doubled the earthquake rate."
                           Gary Whiteford, Professor of Geography,
                           University of New Brunswick

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




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


                            Understandable Unease

        The latest (and apparently continuing) earthquakes in California
     and Nevada suggest an inquiry by U.S. scientists may be long overdue,
     and could lead to an examination of studies over the past twenty
     years from scientists in Britain, Germany, Japan and Canada, warning
     that nuclear tests are weakening the earth's crust, triggering
     earthquakes and causing the earth's pole to shift.
        In a statement on July 14, 1992, responding to "understandable
     unease", the Department of Energy in Washington asserted the
     relationship between nuclear testing and earthquakes is
     "nonexistent."  Yet common sense would suggest the cumulative effect
     of so may nuclear tests around the world would leave the planet at
     least somewhat shaken.  Indeed in 1956, Estes Kefauver, then
     Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate, warned, "H bomb tests could
     knock the earth 16 degrees off its axis!"  He was simply ignored.
        However, in a study twenty years later by two Japanese scientists,
     entitled Recent Abnormal Phenomena on Earth and Atomic Power Tests,
     Shigeyoshi Matsumae, President of Tokai University, and Yoshio Kato,
     Head of the University's Department of Aerospace Science concluded:

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

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

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

        More recently, on 14 April, 1989, at the Second Annual Conference
     on the United Nations and World Peace in Seattle, Washington, Gary T.
     Whiteford, Professor of Geography at the University of New Brunswick
     in Canada, presented the most exhaustive study yet of the
     correlation's between nuclear testing and earthquakes.  In a paper
     entitled "Earthquakes and Nuclear Testing:  Dangerous Patterns and
     Trends," Whiteford presented alarming conclusions which to this day
     have remained almost completely ignored in the United States,
     although the paper has been widely translated and published abroad.
        Whiteford studied all earthquakes this century of more than 5.8 on
     the Richter scale.  "Below that intensity," he explained, "some
     earthquakes would have passed unrecorded in the earlier part of the
     century when measuring devices were less sensitive and less
     ubiquitous.  But for bigger quakes the records are detailed and
     complete for the entire planet."  So Whiteford was able to make a
     simple comparison of the earthquake rate in the first half of the
     century, before nuclear testing, and the rate for 1950 to 1988.  In
     the fifty years before testing, large earthquakes of more than 5.8
     occurred at an average rate of 68 per year.  With the advent of
     testing the rate rose "suddenly and dramatically" to an average of
     127 a year.  The earthquake rate has almost doubled.  To this day the
     U.S. military attributes the increase to "coincidence."  As Whiteford
     comments, "The geographical patterns in the data, with a clustering
     of earthquakes in specific regions matched to specific test dates and
     sites do not support the easy and comforting explanation of `pure
     coincidence.'  It is a dangerous coincidence."
        Within the data he found other suggestive patterns.  The one-two
     nuclear test punch that preceded by only a few days the July
     earthquakes in California this year may reveal a special danger.  The
     largest earthquake this century took place in Tangshan in North-East
     China on July 27 1976.  It measured 8.2 and killed 800,000 people.
     Only five days earlier the French had tested a bomb in the Mururoa
     atoll in the Pacific.  Four days later the United States tested a
     bomb in Nevada.  Twenty-four hours later the earthquake hit China.


                        Killer Quakes and Bomb Tests

        In an even more revealing analysis, Whiteford studies so-called
     "killer earthquakes" in which more than one thousand people have
     died.  He compiled a list of all such quakes since 1953 and matched
     them with nuclear test schedules.  Some test dates were not
     available, but in those that were, a pattern was evident:  62.5% of
     the killer earthquakes occurred only a few days after a nuclear test.
     Many struck only one day after a detonation.  More than a million
     people have now died in earthquakes that seem to be related to
     nuclear tests.  Again, the governments of the nuclear nations claim
     the results are mere coincidence.  Officially the U.S. energy
     department maintains that even their most powerful nuclear tests have
     no impact beyond a radius of 15 miles.  The claim is challenged by
     the instruments of modern seismology that can register nuclear tests
     anywhere in the world by measuring local geological disruptions.
     Whiteford speculated that although the reverberations may fade within
     fifteen miles of a test, they are merely the first ripple of a wave
     that travels through the planet's crust and spreads around the globe.
        In 1991 the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation published Whiteford's
     findings in an article called "Is Nuclear Testing Triggering
     Earthquakes and Volcanic Activity?"  In an interview with California
     State seismologist, Dr. Lalliana Mualchin, the foundation went on to
     inquire into the long-term effects of testing.  Mualchin was asked if
     the cumulative effect of nuclear testing might be to trigger
     earthquakes and volcanoes.  He replied, "A single nuclear test may
     have little effect on the earth, like that of an insect biting an
     elephant.  But the cumulative effect might move the earth's tectonic
     plates in a manner similar to how a swarm of insects might start an
     elephant running."  Mualchin added, "If an insect bites an elephant
     in a sensitive spot, such as an eye or an ear, then there might be a
     vast movement out of all proportion to the size of the bite."  The
     article concluded, "Who will the world hold responsible if suddenly
     an unprecedented series of violent earthquakes and volcanoes shake
     the earth?  Will nuclear testers be able to assure the world they
     were not responsible?"


                          Ten More Years of Tests?

        Recent decisions announced by the Bush administration to "limit"
     tests in size and number for five years are meaningless. They
     represent little or no change from what in fact has been the practice
     for the last several years.  They avoid dealing with the mounting
     call by Congress and the world--through the UN--for a halt by all
     nations to all testing forever.  According to UPI, President George
     Bush will actually veto any effort to halt testing.  Bush says he
     wants testing to continue "for at least ten years" to check the
     safety and reliability of nuclear bombs.  The Russians and the French
     no longer feel the need to conduct such "checks," and have halted
     testing altogether.  Why cannot the USA?
        However, as the next presidential election nears the prospect
     emerges of finally ending fifty years of bomb tests.  Governor Bill
     Clinton's office says he supports a comprehensive nuclear test ban.
     His running-mate Al Gore is one of the supporters of the
     Congressional call for a one-year moratorium on nuclear testing.


** End of text from cdp:gen.newsletter **


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                                    yer friendly neighborhood ratman

                                KOYAANISQATSI

    ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi Language)  n.  1. crazy life.  2. life
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          5. a state of life that calls for another way of living.