Why is water security so complicated?

Assessing our national security is a very complicated process. It is easy to understand the need to assess nuclear arms proliferation, the sale of AK-47s across borders, the sale of arms generally, or, even, failure of crops and famine.

Nixon assessed the imminent failure of the USSR wheat crop and pushed Congress to subsidize our wheat farmers, in the middle of the Cold War, to avoid a starving Russian population to turn Cold War into red-hot conflict. With a cost to the taxpayer we still have not paid off (national debt), he knew that starving people have a way of forcing divides and war — a much more expensive proposition. Think of how Hitler came to power when the German Mark was traded by the wheelbarrow for a loaf of bread.

One of the hot button issues the CIA and other security teams are assessing currently is water: potable (drinkable) water. And it is not a simple issue. In the absence of clean water to drink, whole nations can be forced to seek their future elsewhere, often on our allies’ doorstep, and thus bringing us into a conflict.

And the U.S. potable water situation is not perfect, either. The assessment in every case, country by country, region by region, has two main components: the weather patterns (by season) and the local infrastructure.

Starting with the infrastructure, the United States and most of the European Union are perfect examples of lands where people recognized the need for a network of pipes and cross-feeds to make sure there is a constant supply.

In fact, when you look at the U.S. map for rainfall or access to flowing or standing clean water, there are huge areas that were, as recently as 50 years ago, arid regions that could not be commercially cultivated nor support large populations.

Most of Texas and the Southwest as well as a wide prairie band running up through the middle of the country were seasonally deserts. In the central valleys of California, where most of your fresh vegetables come from, the Colorado River was simply diverted to supply the need.

The cost to the taxpayer for all that irrigation is still being paid for. Water everywhere is an expensive proposition.

The other issue is weather. Regardless of whether you believe in a global climate change (75 percent of all expert scientists do … and if 75 percent of your doctors warned you of imminent heart failure and death, would you simply dismiss them in favor of the 25 percent who said they found nothing wrong?), the fact is that the weather patterns that experts have been measuring for centuries are changing more quickly.

Those weather patterns are very worrying to the CIA and other global security experts because the availability of water, especially seasonally, may cause pressures and wars in the near future, especially where countries do not have the water pipeline and grid systems we have here or that the Europeans do.

The cost for those countries to put in the infrastructure, the grid systems? Many trillions of dollars, at least. What price peace?

The City College of New York prepared two maps. The first one shows the stress created by a shortage of available natural water. The second shows the reduction in stress by making water available through managed systems (pipelines, canals, aqueducts).

The places where there is shortage happen to fall where there is already tension or war: most of Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan, all the southern regions of the old USSR (the ’stans) and, of course, the most worrying of all, China.

In case you were wondering, that area of stress comprises 3.4 billion people or half the planet’s population. No wonder the security agencies are worried.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.