Seismologists at the U.S. Geological Survey, the International Seismological Center, and NASA have come to a consensus about last year's cascading tragedies in Japan that left at least 16,000 dead and half a million homeless. A massive, 9.0 magnitude earthquake hit just off the country's coast on Friday, March 11, the scientists say. The quake triggered huge tsunami waves, and those, in turn, catalyzed a series of nuclear accidents whose consequences will affect Japanese residents for decades.

Jim Stone, a self-professed former National Security Agency analyst with an "engineering background," has a different explanation: The whole thing was a deliberate and dastardly act of nuclear war.

Time to recalibrate your seismographs, because this is Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly look at the planet's most insane conspiracy theories. Like Stone's. He is pretty damn confident – 9,000 words kinda confident – that the earthquake in Japan was no earthquake at all. It was a nuclear explosion, detonated by the Israeli government to stop Japan from enriching uranium for Iran.

First off, Stone writes, Japan and Iran were in cahoots to develop nuclear weapons. That camaraderie didn't sit well with Israel. Their government sprang into action once word leaked that "Japan [had] offered to enrich uranium for Israel's GREAT SATAN, Iran."

Israeli officials wasted no time getting all Rube Goldberg about a retaliation plot. They started by putting a nuclear weapon in the depths of the ocean, just off Japan's coast.

Then, they concealed several nukes inside giant security cameras. A mere four months later, a collective of Israeli engineers pretending to work for a security company – the Dimona Dozen is what Stone calls them – knocked on Japan's door to install some spiffy new, bizarrely enormous security cams inside the Fukushima nuclear reactors.

That done, Israel sat back and waited for a naturally occurring earthquake to strike Japan. When a 6.67 quake hit on March 11, causing minor damage, Israel allegedly leaped into action.

Hold on a sec. Security-camera-nukes? A minor earthquake? "I was in Tokyo for that earthquake," Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, tells Danger Room. "Trust me. That was no minor event."

Not to mention that Israel's hardly got the technology for nukes small enough to be concealed in even the hugest security cameras. And that even if Japan had wanted to enrich uranium for Iran – "which is completely insane," Lewis says – they wouldn't have been able to.

And Lewis would know. In the days before the quake, he was visiting the country's sole nuclear enrichment facility. It wasn't operational. "And for the record, I saw zero Iranians," he informs us.

But suppose we give Stone the benefit of the doubt, and presume that Japan had been palling around with Iran. And that Israel had deposited nukes in several key spots. What then?

Well, when that minor earthquake hit, Israel detonated a bomb off Japan's coast, triggering those massive tsunami waves. And as a final "TAKE THAT for offering help to Iran," Stone writes, Israel detonated the bombs hidden in Fukushima.

Unfortunately, this part of the alleged plot doesn't work either. "The tsunami in Japan was entirely a function of the size of the earthquake," Lewis says. "A huge earthquake is why they experienced a tsunami of that size."

Of course, Stone shouldn't sweat that his in-depth analysis of Japan's natural disaster doesn't pass muster. It's only the latest in a series of theories that posit acts of war for everything from the Haitian Earthquake to 2004's Asian tsunami to Hurricane Katrina. None of those really panned out, either.

Stone, at least, might boast the most narrative prowess of all those crackpots. His write-up includes some choice dramatic reenactments, including the story of Japanese reporters "Atsuo, Airi and Akiyoshi" – the latter two were lovers, the former had set them up – and how their gruesome deaths would have played out, had a 9.0 earthquake really hit Japan.