Russians cling to dream of nuclear earthquake weapon
September 15 1996
by Carey Scott, Moscow

London could face quake of LA scale, say geologists
Russians cling to dream of nuclear earthquake weapon

DISTURBING evidence has come to light that the Russian military
is continuing Soviet-era tests in "seismic warfare", the bizarre
theory that underground nuclear explosions can be directed to
unleash earthquakes and tidal waves against enemies.

The project, whose existence was first reported in this newspaper
in 1993, was believed to have been discontinued after the cold war.
But documents obtained by The Sunday Times show that money is
still being poured into researching how to harness underground
nuclear shock waves into a weapon.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. In a secret 1992 military
document, however, Pavel Grachev, the former defence minister,
ordered scientists to carry out "scientific research and experiments"
in a programme codenamed Vulcan "for the final fulfilment of the
strategic nuclear-tectonic plans of the Russian Federation".

The document ordered the commander of a military installation to
provide resources and personnel for testing, while another analytical
military centre was ordered to provide a detailed account of the results
of the tests; and in an internal government memorandum dated October
1995, the office of Viktor Chernomyrdin, the prime minister, ordered
funding for the "foundation of a new type of strategic-tectonic
weapon".

Last week, foreign experts voiced scepticism about the feasibility of
using a nuclear explosion to cause an earthquake.

Even so, foreign scientific sources told The Sunday Times that the
American military had been discreetly expressing interest in the true
state of Russian research in the seismic weapons field.

The idea of harnessing the force of a nuclear explosion to cause an
earthquake elsewhere on the planet has long intrigued the Russian
military. It was first floated in the 1960s, when Soviet scientists
noticed
that underground nuclear test explosions were sometimes followed a
few days later by earthquakes hundreds of miles away.

In 1975, Leonid Brezhnev, then Soviet leader, hinted that the Russians
had a seismic weapon; and in 1987, just as Mikhail Gorbachev's
perestroika was taking hold, the politburo approved research into the
possibility of causing a quake along the San Andreas fault in
California.
The research was carried out in 22 far-flung insitutes of the
Soviet Union,
among them the Seismological Scientific Centre in Baku, the capital of
Azerbaijan.

Moscow-funded scientists in Baku continued research after their
country's independence in 1991; their aim was the creation of a
"strategic tectonic complex" ­ a nuclear device fed with
information from computers about tectonic plates, the blocks of the
Earth's crust whose movement causes earthquakes.

In a research report from 1994, Ikram Kerimov, a professor from
Baku who worked on seismic warfare tests in the late 1980s, noted
that as a result of the many arms treaties being signed, new and
unexpected weapons technology was being developed ­ and
that the former Soviet Union should not lag behind in research into
"exotic" geophysical, biological and psychological weaponry.

Interest in the geophysical impact of nuclear test explosions is
not unique to the Russians; in the 1960s, investors in Las Vegas
demanded information from the American government about the
possible consequences that nuclear tests in Nevada might have on
their high-rise casinos and many Armenians still believe that it is no
coincidence that the earthquake in Spitak in 1988, which killed 45,000
people, occurred only two days after a nuclear test at Semipalatinsk,
the Soviet testing ground in Kazakhstan.

But foreign experts voiced deep scepticism that Russia could
develop an effective seismic weapon. "There is only a weak link
between a nuclear explosion and an earthquake," said Roger Clark,
of the Department of Earth Sciences at Leeds University, who believes
a nuclear explosion "can speed up the process very slightly ­
by a matter of seconds or minutes, but not more".
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Isa 41:13 For I the LORD thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto
thee, Fear not; I will help thee.