War Plan Red

Spencer Ackerman recounts some thinking about the prospect of leaked plans for a U.S. military effort to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal:

I had a conversation yesterday with a U.S. official who shared with me the gossip that shpilkis roiled the lower intestines of other officials who were awaiting Sy Hersh’s newest New Yorker piece. Huh, I said, what’s it about? My interlocutor hadn’t seen it yet, but rumors traveled: it seemed to concern possible U.S. plans to secure Pakistani nuclear weapons.

My source sighed in frustration. Why was Hersh writing this stuff, if he was in fact writing it? We probably have plans to invade, I don’t know, Canada, my interlocutor continued, since we plan for fucking everything on the planet, and so reporters of Hersh’s stature ought to be able to distinguish between what’s purely hypothetical and what’s real. And now what do we do? We have to say WE HAVE TOTAL CONFIDENCE IN THE PAKISTANIS TO SAFEGUARD THEIR NUKES when no sane human being has *total confidence*. But if they don’t hear that, all this ill will built up from the Kerry-Lugar-Berman missteps and the Waziristan operation and the drones and all the rest will boil over, and we’ll be digging ourselves out of this for weeks…

This turns out to not really be what Hersh’s piece is about. That said, this seems like as good a time as any to talk about War Plan Read, the 1920s-vintage US military plan for an invasion of Canada:

The scenario envisioned involved the U.S. going to war with Britain, and thus attacking Canada as the most realistic short-term way to damage the empire. The important thing was to seize the ports in Atlantic Canada to prevent re-enforcement from Britain of Canadian forces, or resupply of Britain by resource-rich Canada. In probably the most exciting scenario, the Red-Orange plan, we were fighting a British-Japanese alliance. Canada in turn had “defense scheme one.”

Harry Turtledove’s American Empire series envisions a world in which Confederate victory in the Civil War leads to a geopolitical order in which the rump United States is aligned with Germany against a Britain/France/Confederacy/Japan alliance in two world wars.