We don’t often send the Secretary of the Defense to ‘negotiate’. I suspect we’re going to be doing some serious prodding. NYT. US urges 60,000 Americans to leave India. This is probably based on new satellite data and data gleaned from military networks in both countries. Sombre stuff. We provided satellite data to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait days before the Gulf War on the uncoiling of armoured columns in Iraq. We suggested a preventative deployement of US troops to deter an attack. They told us to take a hike. Brent‘s idea is that Rumsfeld is going to tell the participants that we will take out their nukes. Unfortunately, we don’t have a good way to do this. It would be great if we had those new scramjet bombers the DoD is working on. That way we could launch a couple planes from the US, be over the target in 3-4 hours, drop super accurate silo/bunker busting smart bombs, and recover to Europe an hour and a half later. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]
We don’t often send the
