Nostradamus -- Century VI, Quatrain 97
Cinq & quarante degrez ciel bruslera,
Feu approcher de la grand cité neuue,
Instant grand flamme esparse sautera,
Quand on voudra des Normans faire preuue,
At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,
Fire to approach the great new city:
In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,
When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.
Usually such quatrains of Nostradamus start with a year and month indicating the time of the event. The second and third lines of this quatrain evidently describe an above-ground nuclear explosion. The first three nuclear explosions on earth took place in 1945. The first was the atomic bomb Trinity exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945. The second and third were Little Boy and Fat Man dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan with an interval of three days in August, 1945. It is possible that Nostradamus had multiple visions and confused the dates and locations writing down only forty five which was part of 1945. None of the three places at which the atomic bombs exploded was known to Europeans at the time Nostradamus wrote the quatrain.
It would, therefore, be fair to infer that the prediction refers to the atomic bombing of the new cities of Hiroshima or Ngasaki or both in the year 1945. The explanation by some nightmare merchants that the new city refers to New York does not seem to hold water, although anxiety created in that rich city may benefit some people in some ways.
As for the fourth line of the quatrain, the meaning is not hard to understand. One asks for proof from someone whom one does not trust. It means that as a result of the barbaric atomic attacks, the world would stop trusting the men from the north, perhaps meaning North Americans and North Europeans. The cold war following the Second World War is a testimony to that.
It should be understood here that no one can see what has not happened. The visions of Nostradamus consisted of pictures of what had happened in the past at some place in the Universe. He was only trying to correlate them with likely places and times when some thing similar would be repeated on earth. It seems that a specie similar to human beings has existed somewhere in the past and gone through all the developments and experiences that we are now going through. Whether we shall have a better end than them is up to us.
