delanceyplace.com 6/15/12 - australia, atomic bombs, and the aum shinrikyo

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In today's excerpt - Australia, atomic bombs, and the Aum Shinrikyo:

"On my first visit [to Australia], some years ago, I passed the time on the long flight reading a history of Australian politics in the twentieth century, wherein I encountered the startling fact that in 1967 the prime minister, Harold Holt, was strolling along a beach in Victoria when he plunged into the surf and vanished. No trace of the poor man was ever seen again. This seemed doubly as­tounding to me -- first that Australia could just lose a prime minister (I mean, come on) and second that news of this had never reached me.

"The fact is, of course, we pay shamefully scant attention to our dear cousins Down Under -- not entirely without reason, of course. Australia is after all mostly empty and a long way away. Its population, just over 18 million, is small by world standards -- China grows by a larger amount each year -- and its place in the world economy is consequently peripheral; as an economic entity, it ranks about level with Illinois. ...

"But even allowing for all this, our neglect of Australian affairs is curious. Just before I set off on this trip I went to my local library in New Hampshire and looked Australia up in the New York Times Index to see how much it had engaged our attention in recent years. I began with the 1997 volume for no other reason than that it was open on the table. In that year across the full range of possible in­terests -- politics, sports, travel, the coming Olympics in Sydney, food and wine, the arts, obituaries, and so on -- the Times ran 20 arti­cles that were predominantly on or about Australian affairs. In the same period, for purposes of comparison, the Times ran 120 articles on Peru, 150 or so on Albania and a similar number on Cambodia, more than 300 on each of the Koreas, and well over 500 on Israel. ...

"Consider just one of those stories that did make it into the Times in 1997, though buried away in the odd-sock drawer of Sec­tion C. In January of that year, 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.

"You take my point, of course. This is a country that loses a prime minister and that is so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world's first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed. Clearly this is a place worth getting to know."