We got a bellyful of Tom Clancy on 11/9/01. I wouldn't want to rule out the risk of us getting another real soon now. (Not, you understand, that I want us to. I'd much prefer to get a name for crying "wolf" rather than for identifying real threats. But you never know.)

Hmmmm.... It all sounds a bit Tom Clancy.

Referring to the nearness of humanity to the water's edge reminds me of Sean McMullen's 'Greatwinter' trilogy. His science fiction is full of such fantastically strong ideas that you soon forgive his complete inability to write characters. Just the fact that 2/3s of the trilogy is set in Australia makes it exotic.

A lot of this depends on just how big the Indian and Pakistani nuclear weapons really are. It would be optimistic to assume they were the monsters dropped on Japan (which is the assumption the aircraft designers of a half-century ago had to make, but I could imagine them being awkwardly large for sticking onto an IRBM or for external carriage on a fighter.

So a bomber able to carry a lot of conventional bombs internally, or a tanker aircraft, might be a bigger strategic worry than it seems. Though, in the fifties, Chuck Yeager was commanding USAF fighter-bombers, with a nuclear commitment, which couldn't carry enough fuel to get back from their targets.

Edited by author 12-12-2002 06:28 AM
India already has nuclear capable bombers: Mirage 2000s.

The article is only talking about one Tu-22 bomber, which is less then impressive as a nuclear bomber force.... I suspect India wants Backfires as maritime patrol/attack planes to supplement/replace the tu-95 Bears they already have operating.

 Re: India buying Tu-22 bombers.
Both sides in the Kashmir dispute either have or are developing nuclear-capable IRBMs with enough reach to get deep into the other side's territory.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/2014843.stm

 to see what Pakistan could do to the region, and remember that india has a functional native satellite launch capability, which means effectively it has ICBMs in its arsenal.

 The Tu-22s give India a conventional large bomber capability which it currently lacks. It is still prone to interception by SAM systems or fighters and without a standoff capability it would not be a truly useable nuclear-delivery mechanism.

The US's policies are about stable oil prices and reliable supply, not abut getting the lowest price right now. Hence the threats of war, to stop Iraq from attacking the Kuwaiti or Saudi oil fields at a later date. Hence the restrictions on Iraqi oil production, ditto. And hence the opposition to an oil pieline through Iran, which could be cut off at any time.

"War on People Who Won't Sell the USA Oil Cheaply"? For some reason, variations of this idea -- I'll call it the Oil Conspiracy -- apparently have infinite traction with leftish types, much like the gold standard has with a certain kind of libertarian. It's just as completely, ludicrously, wrong, too, as econ 101 and ten minutes with Google can disprove it.

First the econ. Oil is nearly a perfect commodity; it's almost perfectly fungible. Russian and Mexican and Saudi oil are all pretty much perfect substitutes for one another. (A refinery engineer might quibble, but it really would just be quibbling.) You can get a pretty good model for how oil markets work by imagining all of the world's oil producers pouring their oil into a giant tank, and then having an auctioneer auction off the oil. Then the oil is auctioned off, and each producer's take is equal to the share they poured in. The US can't get favorable terms from any one nation, because effectively the oil comes from one big pot. The best it can do is to convince/bully producer nations into increasing production, which lowers prices across the board.

Has the US been doing that? Here's where Google comes in handy. First, it's been threatening war. That increases uncertainty about future supplies, which drives up prices. Okay, strike #1. Second, it's been the foremost supporter of restrictions on Iraqi oil sales, which would reduce the total supply and increase prices. Strike #2. Third, it's opposed building a oil pipeline from the Caspian through the short cheap route via Iran, favoring the longer, more expensive route running through Georgia. Strike #3.

The Oil Conspiracy is a theory that doesn't merely lack evidence, it's actively contradicted by the evidence. Whatever the US govt's strategic aims are, we can be sure that they are not about oil at the cheapest possible price.

Flip side of using QuickTopic, I guess, as oppposed to one of the "in situ" commenting methods. I thought (for long enough to go back and check the Observer link) that you meant that the NY Times first had the story of the Kashmire problem overflowing into the UK... I think the next time I comment on something here (rather than commenting on a comment here), I shall include a link back to the blog item itself.

Actually, as unclearly indicated at the bottom of the Guardian posting, that's Tom Friedman's regular bi-weekly New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/31/opinion/31FRIE.html">. I bother to mention this only because I went to see why the Guardian seemed to be writing about Friedman's piece, and if they credited him, only to find that it was the same piece, semi-credited, in the sense that it says "New York Times" at the bottom of the Guardian posting, but no mention that it's his regular column. And if they'd made that clearer, and you'd therefore had identified it as such, I wouldn't have bothered to go through all this.... :-)

I'd hoped I was being paranoid, but it seems I have company according to The Observer...

Tony Blair: Send in the Army!

And then a civil servant has the tricky job of explaining that the Army is scattered around the world, peace-keeping.

Whereupon a junior civil servant says, "I understand the German Army has troops to spare."

On the London will Burn thing -- I sincerely hope I'm wrong....

Ouch.

I hadn't realized there were water issues--substantive, hard-to-agree-on things--in there along with the weirdo nationalisms and the people who somehow think that the gods can be impressed by throwing rocks at nonbelievers.

Excellent post. I wasn't aware of these issues. I'm not sure yet of your conclusions but it gets me definetly thinking. Thanks.