a devastating earthquake, initially estimated at Richter magnitude 8.9 but later upgraded to magnitude 9.0, struck Japan's divided island of Honshu.

Its epicenter was located in the Miyagi prefecture, within the People's Democratic Republic of Japan, commonly known in the West as North Japan. The PDRJ had been established in 1947 under the direction of occupation forced from the Soviet Union following the invasion of the Japanese Home Islands which ended the Pacific phase of World War II.

The earthquake was discovered to have done serious damage to the Fukushima Dai-Ichi Nuclear Power Plant located in the town of Okuma in the Futaba District of Fukushima Prefecture, whose namesake Please click the icon to follow us on Facebook.city had been permanently established as the capital of North Japan in 1948. The seriousness of the damage was concealed for several days by the Communist regime of "People's Secretary" Tadayoshi Ichida, by which time at least two of the plant's six reactors were approaching meltdown despite the efforts of technicians and drafted labor to shut them down. Additionally, a cooling pool for spent fuel rods was reported to have dried up, leaving the fiercely radioactive and highly flammable rods exposed to the air.

The accident was greeted with horror in Tokyo, capital of the Republic of Japan, AKA South Japan. It was feared that in the event of a meltdown a huge plume of radioactive material might - depending on the direction of the wind at the time - drift southward across the demilitarized zone separating the two Japans just north of Tokyo. Although no Japanese cities had ever been subjected to nuclear attack, the images from Kaesong and Pyongyang after the bombings of September 9 and 12, 1952, had left a deep impression upon the Japanese people, many of whom became convinced that the U.S. had been willing to use this weapon in Korea because its targets were nonwhite. A 1995 alternative history novel, The Fallen Sun, depicted a world in which the German discovery of uranium fission had occurred not in December 1939, after the outbreak of the Second World War, but a year earlier, so that word of the discovery was not suppressed by the Nazi regime before reaching the West. As a result, in the novel, the war ended in late 1945 following the atomic bombing of two Japanese cities, forestalling the planned joint U.S.-Soviet invasion which resulted in the division of the land of the Rising Sun. The novel, first published in Japan, proved highly popular in the U.S. and Europe - and highly controversial both in Japan and abroad for its suggestion that such a world might in some ways be better, even for Japan, than the "real" one in which others had been the first to die beneath a mushroom cloud.

The secretive North Japanese government showed its desperation when, on March 14, it revealed just how seriously it had been harmed by the earthquake, and in particular how dangerous the situation had become at the Fukushima facility. Offers of help followed from the U.S., Europe, the Korean Union and even South Japan, which had itself sustained serious damage in the March 11 quake. The question was whether that aid would be enough, and in time enough, to avert an even greater disaster.