The N-Boat Standoff

If you live east of the Mississippi, you should probably go have a talk with your congressman and senators. The odds are high that they are lawyers who didn’t much go in for geography in school. Probably they are unfamiliar with names like Diego Garcia, La Pérouse Strait, the Kuril Islands, Skagerrak, the Bosporus, and the Barents Sea. They were mad at Turkey over the Cyprus affair; they are adamantly opposed to any action in Angola or anywhere else. Chances are the only maps on the office wall are precinct maps with lots of little colored buttons. The more reason why you should talk to them, for all of you live in the prime target area.

Remember the Maginot Line? It was the largest and most elaborate fixed defense system since the Great Wall of China. But like the Great Wall it failed to keep the barbarians at bay. By the 1950s new Maginot Lines were being built on the plains of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota and in the Urals, in Russia, in the form of air-conditioned tombs called missile silos. Not until the U.S. Navy brought out the missile-carrying Polaris submarine was the Maginot mentality minimized and the umbrella raised.

RB

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Richard L. Barkley

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If you live east of the Mississippi, you should probably go have a talk with your congressman and senators. The odds are high that they are lawyers who didn’t much go in for geography in school. Probably they are unfamiliar with names like Diego Garcia, La Pérouse Strait, the Kuril Islands, Skagerrak, the Bosporus, and the Barents Sea. They were mad at Turkey over the Cyprus affair; they are adamantly opposed to any action in Angola or anywhere else. Chances are the only maps on the office wall are precinct maps with lots of little colored buttons. The more reason why you should talk to them, for all of you live in the prime target area.

Remember the Maginot Line? It was the largest and most elaborate fixed defense system since the Great Wall of China. But like the Great Wall it failed to keep the barbarians at bay. By the 1950s new Maginot Lines were being built on the plains of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota and in the Urals, in Russia, in the form of air-conditioned tombs called missile silos. Not until the U.S. Navy brought out the missile-carrying Polaris submarine was the Maginot mentality minimized and the umbrella raised.