THE AUM NUKE

Here at Doc40 we love a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves DIY nuclear weapons. Although I cultivated a morbid interest the Aum Shinrikyo death cult through the 1990s – they were the characters who, in 1995, loosed Sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway – I hadn’t heard this quite amazing story until I read about it in Bill Bryson’s book In a Sunburned Country…

“In January 1997, according to a report written in America by a Times re­porter, scientists were seriously investigating the possibility that a mysterious seismic dis­turbance in the remote Australian outback al­most four years earlier had been a nuclear explosion set off by members of the Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo.

"It happens that at 11:03 p.m. local time on May 28, 1993, seismograph needles all over the Pacific region twitched and scribbled in response to a very large-scale disturbance near a place called Banjawarn Station in the Great Victoria Desert of Western Australia. Some long-distance truckers and prospec­tors, virtually the only people out in that lonely expanse, reported seeing a sudden flash in the sky and hearing or feeling the boom of a mighty but far-off explosion. One reported that a can of beer had danced off the table in his tent.

"The problem was that there was no obvi­ous explanation. The seismograph traces didn't fit the profile for an earthquake or mining explosion, and anyway the blast was 170 times more powerful than the most powerful mining explosion ever recorded in Western Australia. The shock was consistent with a large meteorite strike, but the impact would have blown a crater hundreds of feet in circumference, and no such crater could be found. The upshot is that scientists puz­zled over the incident for a day or two, then filed it away as an unexplained curiosity-- the sort of thing that presumably happens from time to time.

"Then in 1995 Aum Shinrikyo gained sud­den notoriety when it released extravagant quantities of the nerve gas sarin into the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve people. In the investigations that followed, it emerged that Aum's substantial holdings in­cluded a 500,000-acre desert property in Western Australia very near the site of the mystery event. There, authorities found a laboratory of unusual sophistication and focus, and evidence that cult members had been mining uranium. It separately emerged that Aum had recruited into its ranks two nuclear engineers from the for­mer Soviet Union. The group's avowed aim was the destruction of the world, and it ap­pears that the event in the desert may have been a dry run for blowing up Tokyo.”

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