How I Wonder What You Aargh

[JAPH]

@avatar

But even leaving aside those things, the chief problem with such a plan is that it is a plan basically isomorphic to China, say, or France, or Australia, in the middle of the Cold War deciding that what they really ought to do is frame one of the superpowers for launching a massive nuclear first-strike on the grounds that after triggering Armageddon, they can sit back and relax in the assurance that they’ll come out ahead and the bad consequences will only happen to other people.

The real Operation Northwoods, unlike the version in Stross’s Merchant Princes books, wasn’t proposing a nuclear false flag (that anyone’s admitted, anyway!), but it was close enough.