If current Russian president Vladimir Jugashvili Putin wants to show that his thinking is better than that of the Soviet era--where escaped Soviet pilot Viktor Belenko noted that they were trying to grow maize in Siberia--he could do little worse than the evident proposal to make a tunnel between Siberia and Alaska.
How so? Well, look at a highway map of Alaska, and then move over to the Russian side. If you look closely, you will see that there is something pretty obviously missing.
Roads and railroads to the area.
And of course, there is a reason for this; it's incredibly difficult to build roads on permafrost. To get to Welsh, Alaska, you can take a boat (in summer), a plane, or, when you've got diptheria antitoxin to deliver and a good dog named Balto, a dogsled. To build roads on permafrost, you're talking a similar amount of money as was spent on the Alaska Pipeline--$8 billion in 1974, or about $52 billion today. The Russian side would be even worse, so we're really talking about somewhere north of $100 billion when....if there really was a market for U.S.-Russian trade, ships could embark from the end of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in Vladivostok and arrive in Seattle. High speed rail in California looks positively intelligent in comparison.
The reality here is that such a proposal is a gambit by Putin to soothe the ego of our President and get him to sell out Ukraine. If it were, by some tragedy, actually built, it could also serve as a highway to achieve something Putin's minions are hoping to see; Alaska again as a territory of Russia. Let's hope and pray neither happens.
No comments:
Post a Comment