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current situation.”
    “As you are aware, Mr. President, Japan and China have argued for decades over the delineation of their respective exclusive economic zones. The Law of the Seas doctrine, as set out by the UN, sets the boundary of a nation’s EEZ at two hundred nautical miles away from their baseline. Problem is, Japan considers its baseline to be its coast, while China considered its baseline to be the continental shelf, which adds significantly to the amount of territory it can claim. However, even if they agreed on baseline definitions, they would still have a problem: since the East China Sea is only about 360 nautical miles wide, there’s an overlap of about forty miles of disputed area that consists of about forty thousand square kilometers of contested ocean. Now, here’s the real kicker: the epicenter of the contested area is located in the Chunxiao region—an area containing a huge oil/gas reservoir that lies between 3,300 and 6,500 feet below the surface along a 620-mile-long trough. The fields have an estimated reserve potential in the area of eighteen billion barrels of oil and 360 billion cubic feet of natural gas. I don’t need to tell you how strategically important this is to both countries. Parenthetically, the EEZ question is not unique to the East China Sea. We have a similar issue brewing now in the Arctic region regarding ownership of mineral rights for resources exposed by the disappearing ice caps.”
    He stopped his presentation for a moment as an aide approached the president and whispered something in his ear. The president nodded and waved the aide off, saying, “Go ahead, Admiral, please continue your briefing.”
    “The Chinese recognized the potential of this find early on and in 2006 set up what was known as the Chunxiao gas platform, about four kilometers from the EEZ median line. Both nations grudgingly accepted the EEZ line even as they contested it. Japan claimed the platform was extracting gas from deposits under the Japanese EEZ and requested a geologic audit. The Chinese said no dice. The Japanese then sent in their own geologic ship to take surveys, and the Chinese quickly sent a couple of warships out to discourage them. The Japanese geologic ship pulled out, but later the Japanese positioned their own oil platforms and drilling ships about ten kilometers inside their side of the EEZ. This didn’t please the Chinese, but what could they say when their rigs were far closer to the EEZ median line than Japan’s?”
    “About one month ago, the Chinese floated into place a massive new sixth-generation oil platform known as Dragon II. It is the beast of all platforms, built in the Cosco Shipyard in Shanghai, and it was to be China’s showcase platform, designed to attract markets for deepwater platform leasing all over the world. Problem is they moved it into a position that was far closer to the contested median line than ever before—roughly two kilometers. The Japanese were furious and had planned to make it an issue at the UN Security Council.”
    The president looked up from the notes he was taking and said, “Let me summarize what I think you just said, Admiral: two great nations in dire need of oil and gas—like all of us—have escalated their concerns into a shooting war over a disputed border that lies a mile under the ocean. Is that correct?”
    “Yes, that’s about right, Mr. President. We don’t know the full extent of the damages yet, nor do we have a feel for whether one or both sides will escalate this into a larger war. I expect information on potential developments within the next twelve to twenty-four hours, but for now I just don’t know.”
    The heated discussion that followed revolved around a number of what-if scenarios. The president found it useful, but he still had no clear idea of how to respond to the calls he expected to receive from leaders of both countries. When he broached that issue, he triggered yet another testy discussion as to