Japan warns citizens they might have only 10 minutes to prepare for a North Korean missile (25 April 2017). Image Source: AFP/Getty via Washington Post.
The blog returns on 1 May 2017 after a break, with a series of posts which will explain fake news, cyber-memes, techno-cultural disinformation, virtual politics, and the perception of truth. Today's post is a prologue. The nuclear issue triggers all of these uncertainties. When it comes to nuclear matters, you never really know what is happening, and the stakes are high.
On Sunday, 23 April 2017,
a truck carrying
Iridium-192 was stolen in
Tlaquepaque, Jalisco state, Mexico. This radioactive material can be used to make a
dirty bomb, and it has not yet been recovered.
Meanwhile, the
world nervously
eyes the
Korean peninsula. It is curious that there have been a recent
changes in and around leadership in both Koreas. These might indicate (or lead to) an incredibly
delicate and
dangerous effort to reconcile the two countries. In
South Korea, Park Geun-hye was
impeached in December 2016, charged in
April 2017 with corruption, and
publicly condemned for witchcraft.
Liberal human rights lawyer Moon Jae-in is projected to win a May 2017 South Korean election, and he may
soften the tone on North Korea.
British tabloids and the
American media are openly speculating on whether
Trump's administration should
assassinate Kim Jong-un to stop a
nuclear war. But
Jong-un has been careful to eliminate successors, with
few remaining close family members. The fact that he may
have had his half-brother,
Kim Jong-nam, assassinated on 13 February 2017 raised eyebrows. The use of the
rare VX poison in the killing was even more
disturbing. Developed by the
British in the mid-1950s, it is the world's most toxic nerve agent and classed as a weapon of mass destruction. To use it in a public place on a
direct descendant of North Korea's
Baekdu Bloodline was a sign of extreme ruthlessness.
Even more than
all the other
atrocities and
executions, the murder of Jong-nam
really scared people; it
merited research and reconsideration of what is happening in Pyongyang.
I have previously blogged about the Kim family and possible successors
here. A favourite possibility among western leaders is Kim Jong-un's nephew and Jong-nam's son,
Kim Han-sol, who is
now 21 years old. Han-sol
turned down an offer to study at Oxford University in February 2017,
due to fears that he would be assassinated there.
North Korea is
planning another nuclear test and rapidly
developing its nuclear weapons program and
ballistic missiles. It is hard to tell whether the tensions on the peninsula are a deadly
game of bluff, or if
Trump's unpredictable administration is planning
preemptive action to
contain North Korea's capabilities, or if this is a
game of 4-D chess, marked by psychological warfare and
sabre-rattling.
"A jet with blocked details landed at Wellington Airport[, New Zealand] on Monday evening [24 April 2017]." Image Source: Flight Radar 24 via stuff.co.nz.
There are reports on rehearsals for
ex-pat civilian
evacuations from
South Korea. Officials from the
Five Eyes intelligence network (USA, UK, NZ, Australia and Canada) met in Queenstown, New Zealand
over the weekend of the 21-23 April. On
26 April, Kim Jong-un watched a giant live-fire drill (see it
here) to mark the 85th anniversary of the founding of the North
Korean People's Army. The
US Senate has been summoned for a White House briefing regarding North Korea, also on
26 April 2017.
At the same time, there are
drills in New York City to prepare for a simulated direct nuclear bomb strike over Manhattan on 24-26 April 2017, which may have already involved power outages in San Francisco; New York; Frankfort, Kentucky; and Los Angeles.
Operation Gotham Shield uses a 10 kiloton yield, or a bomb a bit larger than a '
suitcase nuke,' as its hypothetical weapon. The
FEMA overview manual for Gotham Shield is
here. A November 2016 simulated nuclear attack (the Northern Lights Nuclear Power Plants Exercise) checked the
readiness of the electrical grid at the
Monticello plant and
Camp Ripley, Minnesota on the
US-Canadian border.
I have previously argued on this blog that the US had already nuked itself through numerous bomb tests over the past 70 years and lives in denial of this fact. In
February 2017, there was an explosion at a French nuclear plant, Flamanville, but there was "no nuclear risk."
Even more incredible denial is evident in Japan,
where three
China Syndromes have likely occurred at Fukushima. Yet on the sixth anniversary of the
Tōhoku earthquake,
tsunami, and
nuclear disaster, the government has
invited families to reinhabit the exclusion zone. Fish are
declared safe to eat.
Deeper denial: the summer 2020 Olympic games are
partly set there!
Worse, workers
were told they
no longer needed protective suits at 95 per cent
of the site. The rumour ran that this was because the huge quantity of hazmat suits became too expensive; the workers were
considered likely to die anyway from exposure; therefore, the suits could be dispensed with to cut costs. There are
unconfirmed stories and
muted reports (often ending in
dead links) of a TEPCO cover-up of
thousands of
dead Fukushima workers, whose employment is run by the Japanese mob, the
Yakuza.
This is an insane '
war without a war,' a nightmare in which Japanese aquifers are
irretrievably poisoned. In
February 2017, there was unconfirmed talk that
underground explosions occurred, likely due to the
molten coria hitting the water table. These explosions were heard and felt miles away from the plant.
Also in February, a robot measured a staggering 530 sieverts per hour inside Reactor #2 - far higher than any
reading ever recorded at Chernobyl.
That reading could be ten times higher close to the elusive core. Due to the unwillingness to face the devastation of atomic realities, it is worth remembering the aftermath in an uninhabited nuclear wasteland.
The date 26 April 2017 shifts attention to another nuclear theatre. Today's post commemorates the
31st anniversary of the second-worst nuclear disaster in history at the Chernobyl plant and Pripyat, Ukraine. The blog follows
American Millennial urbex Youtuber Josh, who said Pripyat was "legit" during his visit in March 2016. Actually, that is true. To understand the magnitudes of radiation which Josh's MKS-05
Terra-P dosimeter displayed (in microsieverts (uSv) per hour), go
here and
here. One
sievert (1,000,000
microsieverts) if absorbed all at once is enough to make you ill; 6 to 10 sieverts will cause death.
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