Foreign Affairs - Compromised Command

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Clark responded to the Russians' seizure of the Pristina airfield by seeking to oust them. After his subordinate on the ground, British General Michael Jackson, told him, "I'm not starting World War III for you," London ordered Jackson not to comply with Clark's order to block the airfield's runways. The British action averted any potential crisis, something about which Clark was apparently not concerned. His attitude toward containing the Russian role was consistent with the general confidence about NATO's hegemony in Europe and America's hegemony in NATO that was implicit in the whole enterprise.

But even though Clark's prose reveals a sharp sensibility about most things, he has a tin ear for Russian interests. He reports how Russian General Viktor Barynkin told him during the Dayton negotiations, "We know what you Americans are up to. ... You are coming into Bosnia because it's in our part of Europe and you want to be there. And you say you will be gone in a year, but you won't be; you will stay." Clark reflected that the Russians "saw the peace plan in Cold War terms ... to establish spheres of influence," as if the Russians were hidebound reactionaries. Yet nothing that has happened in the six years since proves Barynkin wrong. What are the Balkans now if not an expanded sphere of influence for NATO -- one nudging Russia's front door?

The New Yorker's / Slate

Being "sure" of oneself is not quite the same as a compulsive snap judger who does things by whim, as when he threatened to open fire on Russian positions during one close call in the NATO campaign over Kosovo. Fred Kaplan

1. Russia CANNOT sell its energy elsewhere. There is no infrastructure to do so. And there won't be for a long while. And the oil or gas that might go to China would never go to Europe anyway.

2. Europe could do without Russian energy supplies if it had an energy policy other than "give me all your gas quick and cheap". We might stop building gas-fired plants, we might start focusing on energy savings, etc... Obviously, we don't do it, but we could.

The Norwegians began making fertilizer from hydroelectricity 100 years ago.

At the turn of this century Professor Kristian Birkeland[1] of the University of Kristiania (soon to be renamed Oslo) was experimenting with a device called the Terella. This was a laboratory model of the earth, complete with magnetic field, placed in an evacuated vessel into which ions could be injected at high voltage. By observing the discharge glow, Birkeland was able to understand the three-dimensional structure of the Aurora Borealis. However, the equipment was expensive and money, then as now, was hard to come by. Kelvin suggested to Birkeland that research into armaments might prove lucrative and allow him to continue with the Terella. This was not the first time this idea had occurred to a physicist, Birkeland with his expertise in electromagnetism, set about producing an elektriske kanon, a rail-gun.

On Feb. 6th, 1902 Birkeland's kanon short-circuited and exploded during a test, but the disappointment he felt was muted by the observation of a disc-shaped arc, spread by the magnetic field, and the smell of nitrogen oxides. The reason this was intriguing was that the world was then gripped by a fear greater even than that of the looming conflict in Central Europe - that of world famine. Chilean nitrate deposits, on which the world depended as a fertilizer, were on the brink of running out, and chemists were scurrying to find an economical way of fixing atmospheric nitrogen. Clearly the acrid brown stench of nitrogen oxides was the smell of nitrogen being fixed, as it was a short hop skip and a jump to nitric acid and any nitrate you please.

Birkeland was not the first to fix nitrogen by electric arc - Crookes in Manchester already had a pilot plant producing calcium nitrate by this means - but the disc-shaped arc promised a high yield[2]. However, a week after the explosion he met a man who was already working on the means which would make economical production possible. That man was Sam Eyde, a civil engineer who was fascinated by the enormous potential of Norway's mountains and rainfall for the production of hydro-electricity. After that things moved with breath-taking speed. A week after meeting, Eyde and Birkeland submitted a patent for artificial fertilizer. They obtained money from the Swedish financiers, the Wallenbergs, and a mere three years later a hydroelectric plant had been built out of the wilderness at Notodden and a Birkeland-Eyde arc furnace was producing the first Norgesalpeter - Norwegian Saltpeter, i.e. calcium nitrate.

In the same year as the first Norgesalpeter was produced, Fritz Haber discovered a much better way of producing nitrates via ammonia made by what is now known as the Haber process. Indeed, the Norwegians soon abandoned the arc furnaces and adopted Haber's idea. However, Birkeland's discovery had started something irreversible: the large scale development of hydro-electric power in Norway by the company he and Eyde had started: Norsk Hydro.