alt Hacker News> Under international law, the desalination plants are protected. But I have seen enough Middle Eastern wars to know the weight of the Geneva Conventions when missiles and bombs start flying.
Not just the Middle East either. The author does note this later in piece ("Zaporizhzhia") where Russia has been bombing Ukrainian power-plants, in a war-crime way which is much more about freezing civilians to death in the winter than measured military goals.
> “Riyadh would have to evacuate within a week if the plant, its pipelines, or associated power infrastructure were seriously damaged or destroyed,” according to a 2008 memo from the US embassy in the kingdom released by Wikileaks.
To make another, odder connection: Hong Kong. Once or twice back during the PRC crackdown on free speech, I've seen people wonder about local independence, but the region is entirely dependent on fresh water piped in from across the border, so all an enraged PRC would need to do is start closing some valves. The large flow needed would be difficult to ship by tanker (and easy to blockade) and any desalinization system (bringing us back to this topic) would be somewhere the top-5 largest in the world... and probably require a nuclear-reactor to power it locally too.
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Whiskey-Pete insists there are no rules, so no way any of them care about international law, they are still murdering fishermen off Venezuela as recently as last week
But what's powering all those plants? Doesn't desalination require huge amount of power?
I am assuming it's natural gas and not oil but still they could lose power sources even without the plant itself being damaged or destroyed
>Not just the Middle East either. The author does note this later in piece ("Zaporizhzhia") where Russia has been bombing Ukrainian power-plants, in a war-crime way which is much more about freezing civilians to death in the winter than measured military goals
“Yes, I am afraid electricity also drives command-and-control systems. If President Milošević really wants all of his population to have water and electricity, all he has to do is accept NATO’s five conditions and we will stop this campaign. But as long as he does not do so we will continue to attack those targets [that] provide the electricity for his armed forces. If that has civilian consequences, it is for him [Milošević] to deal with
Shea, 1999