I see no ships

With the debate about the existence or otherwise of Saddam’s WMDs raging fiercely on a previous post (until I unintentionally deleted it, in some kind of spasm), I was delighted last night to unearth my copy of the 19 February 2003 edition of the Evening Standard:

The only other paper to run this story was the Telegraph, although it somehow refrained from using the phrase “SHIPS OF TERROR”. It caused a bit of a stir. Suddenly, in the home straight before we finally went to war—with all the people determined to start it busy claiming they weren’t determined to start it—everything seemed to be going a bit Tom Clancy. Iraqi ships packed with illicit WMDs circling the ocean, ready to scuttle at a moment’s notice? Amazing. Maybe Tony and George were right after all. I missed the TV news that evening, but I didn’t mind; I knew a story this big would be in all the papers the next day, if only so it could be denied.

From that day to this, there hasn’t been a single reference to this story in any newspaper. The Telegraph removed it from its archives the day after publication. The occasional puzzled blogger has made reference to it before, and the text of the Standard article occasionally turns up in conspiracy forums, but that’s the extent of it.

What the hell happened? Was the story entirely made up? Were the Standard and the Telegraph sold a pup they were both then too ashamed to acknowledge? Normally such behaviour would at least merit a passing gloat in Private Eye. Were some naval manoeuvres mistaken for suspicious enemy activity? Was there, after all, some suspicious enemy activity that a Ministry thought it best we pretended not to know about, and so slapped a D-Notice on the offending publications? Was it an early April Fool?

Your suggestions are welcome. Let’s see if we can make this journal the premier online resource for wild speculation about the Iraqi “Ships of Terror”.

No no, there's no limit

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, one of the many things that was changed forever was the notion of airspace. Before then, it had been safe to assume that the space above a country simply belonged to that country; suddenly, with wealthy nations able to sling their technology overhead at will, it turned out there was a natural boundary after all, somewhere before the oxygen ran out. The exact boundary remains undefined in international law, which is probably just as well. One country in particular would vigorously resist such a law, because apparently it has still not even accepted the principle that there is any upper limit to its airspace. That country is Norway.

No, it isn’t. It is, of course, France. The country apparently believes it extends infinitely upwards. Best of all for fans of Gallic sophistication and blowing up boats belonging to environmental protestors, the spin of the Earth’s axis and the shape of its orbit mean that there is by now [very probably] no part of the universe that has not, technically, been French.


Fig. 1: Infinite France