(This article was written by Maria Maalouf and appeared in Arab News. The only glimmer of hope in Sudan)

The outbreak of violence in Sudan last week, which is now simmering between the country’s two most powerful military leaders and their forces, was sadly predictable. The alliance of convenience between the two warlords — built on a shared contempt for the democratic aspirations of Sudanese civilians — has crumbled into a battle for supremacy, in which civilians suffer collateral losses.

After the popular revolt that toppled Omar Bashir in 2019, Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan — the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces — and Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemeti — the commander of the Rapid Support Forces — overcame bureaucratic and ethnic prejudices by championing a common cause. Unfortunately, their partnership was built on undermining, delaying and obstructing Sudan’s transition to democratic civilian rule. The two leaders sought to evade accountability for crimes dating back to the genocide in Darfur and the recent massacre of more than 120 unarmed protesters in June 2019.

Above all, their arrangement was based on the shared understanding that the Sudanese army would never be accountable to civilian authorities. But they have yet to decide which leader will end up at the top once civilians are permanently sidelined. For the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces, the partnership has been very successful. They pretended to be partners of the Sudanese civil parties while exploiting their bickering; they have derided international partners who support a civilian-military transitional government; and they pretended to be responsible parties on the world stage by pledging to participate in counterterrorism operations and declaring their support for the Abraham Accords and normalizing relations with Israel.

The Sudanese Resistance Committees — the tireless, decentralized protest movements that were the primary engine of Bashir’s ouster — generally remained suspicious of the two military leaders. Still, the international community adopted what it convinced itself was the only realistic approach — dealing with the two warlords. The Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces were firmly embedded in all aspects of Sudanese life. Dagalo, in particular, sought to enrich himself, including through mining schemes with the Russians. Avoiding severe consequences for repeated acts of impunity that might have led to change, the West has instead appeased and courted the two warlords.

In October 2021, during Jeffrey Feltman’s tenure as the first US special envoy to the Horn of Africa, he and his team of American diplomats held a series of meetings to address what Al-Burhan and Dagalo insisted were their concerns about the transitional arrangements. In a closing session that included leaders and civilian Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok, the US delegation presented ideas for easing tensions and addressing some of the leaders’ concerns to renew momentum behind the civil-military partnership. The two commanders and Hamdok adhered to the plan proposed by the Americans. But five hours later, despite US support for the compromises they favored, the two leaders staged a coup, arresting Hamdok, his government and dozens of others.

The American team tried to work with the two commanders in good faith, but their move showed that they never intended to reciprocate.

Since then, history has repeated itself over and over again — the armed forces and RSF leaderships have made commitments, only to break them later. More recently, the UN, the African Union and the Intergovernmental Authority on Development facilitated discussions on forming a civilian government.

The Quartet — the US, the UK, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — helped broker a framework agreement. One can argue whether the formation of a civilian government in early April, as planned during these discussions, would be sufficiently credible in the eyes of the resistance committees. But that is all in the past now, as the Sudanese army and the RSF have given up on negotiations and decided to go after each other instead. Al-Burhan and Dagalo seem to be fighting a fight to the death.

With impressive speed, regional leaders agreed to send a team of three heads of state to Khartoum, showing that Sudan’s neighbors know that the region, too, would suffer in the event of an all-out civil war. The African Union, the UN, the EU and the US can be expected to support this initiative, and such support will be essential. But given that the international community has been deeply tarnished by its insistence on working with the same leaders responsible for the recent violence, the region will have to take the lead.

A ceasefire based on power-sharing between the two warlords will not be stable and it is not easy to ignore the Sudanese people’s aspirations for democracy and civilian rule. Even at the peak of Al-Burhan and Dagalo’s partnership, brute force did not defeat the resistance committees. Until now, civilians in Sudan have been facing a united front composed of Al-Burhan and Dagalo. Assuming it survives, it is understood that the civilian authority will better confront a security apparatus that is likely to be divided and fractured and less able or willing to impose its rule. This outcome may be unlikely, but it is the only glimmer of hope one can find in this horrific tragedy.

Maria Maalouf is a Senior Media Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

On the evening of Sunday, September, 5, 1999, two pairs of Arab terrorists planned to plant bombs on a pair of intercity buses filled with passengers, destination Jerusalem. One car headed for the Haifa terminal and the other for the terminal in Tiberias. Prior observation had revealed that these buses were not routinely searched by Israeli security. One team member of each pair would board a bus, and place a luggage bomb with 15 kilos (33 lbs.) of explosive in the baggage compartment. Each member would get off the bus at an interim stop and rejoin his comrade, whose vehicle was to follow the bus. Upon retrieving the bomber, each car would escape before the simultaneous Jerusalem detonations at 6:30 PM on Sunday, September 5.

Enter Father Time. At 5:30 PM the car headed for Haifa was at a rest stop, while one member got a cup of coffee, en route to a 6:30 PM date with destiny in Haifa, the bomb exploded, killing his partner in the car. Sixty miles away, in downtown Tiberias at almost the exact moment, the second bomb detonated in the car, killing both. Each blast destroyed much surrounding property, but neither harmed innocents.

Israel, a global outlier, had returned to Standard Time early on Friday, Septernber 3. But the Palestine Authority, along with most countries, including most Arab countries, did not return to Standard Time until early on Sunday, September 5. Both bombs had been assembled by West Bank Palestinians, and were set to detonate at 6:30 PM West Bank local time. The recipient terrorists had neglected to check for this temporary time discrepancy. Thus, both bombs detonated at 5:30 Israeli local time, an hour early. Daylight Saving Time, that fateful day, lived up literally to its name.

The story of Daylight Saving Time (DST)—an “s” added to Saving is deemed equally acceptable though formally incorrect—was superbly told by author David Prerau in Seize the Daylight (2005). The pre-DST tale of time travails begins with the ancients, and before getting to DST traverses several intermediate phases. Author Prerau traces the evolution of time measurement from the sundial, though Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and the 1883 adoption of Standard Time, after which the prolonged saga of DST commences in 1905. A more detailed examination of the road to Standard Time is presented in author Clark Blaise’s Time Lord (2000). Between these two books we can ride a whale of a tale, in which prominent crusaders play benign versions of Captain Ahab, with far greater success than Herman Melville’s doomed protagonist in Moby Dick.

Sun Time: “God’s Time” Meets Sundial. Prerau divides the history of time’s intersection with humanity into four phases: (1) Sun Time; (2) Mean Time; (3) Standard Time; and (4) Daylight Saving Time. Sun Time is also known as God’s Time and/or Nature’s Time; the role humans played was simply that of passively measuring time. The latter trio involved humans creating new measures of time to meet the evolving needs of societies.

We begin with two ancient civilizations: Sumer, nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers (Mesopotamia then, Iraq today); and Egypt, whose ancient capital was Thebes, by the west bank of the Nile. Obelisks were erected to guide the activities of religious worship and government officials. At least 3,500 years ago, Egyptians subdivided time by using the sundial. Noon was marked by the longest shadow, vertically lined with the tip of the obelisk. This measure was essentially unchanged for 3,000 years. Later, Hipparchus (ca. 190-120 B.C.), the Greek astronomer, cartographer and mathematician, divided the Earth into 180 parallel horizontal lines (later, latitude) and 180 parallel vertical lines (later, longitude). These longitudinal lines became known as meridians, after the Latin meredies—midday—as along each meridian line the noon hour is the same.

Ca. 1270 marked the advent of the mechanical clock. In his book, The Measure of Reality, author Alfred W. Crosby writes that the division of time into units of one hour reflected a recognition that unlike days, which are bounded by the natural events of light and darkness, and unlike calendars, which are encrusted with customs and traditions—holidays—hours are an arbitrary duration and thus readily definable by utilitarian criteria. The ancients had thought of time as a continuous flow; the need for more precision led during the High Middle Ages to learning regard time as a series of discrete quanta. Public clocks used bells to guide urban dwellers, where most commerce flourished and thus were in need of regularity. The English word “clock” is derived from the French cloche and the German Glocke, for bell. The next step was the escapement, an oscillating mechanism for precise mechanical alternation between tick and tock. Crosby adds that in the 17th century, the final steps in fixing calendar time came with counting years, per the Jesuit scholar Dominic’s Petavius (B.C/A.D and C.E./B.C.E.), and migrating from the 4th century Julian to the 18th century Gregorian calendar.

The public clock, usually in a town square, first appeared in London in 1292, Paris in 1300 and Padua in 1344. A 14th century Cairene astronomer and mathematician, Abdul-Hassan al-Marrakushi, used trigonometry to create the mathematical 24-hour day, which by the end of the 15th century had spread throughout Europe. Until the 16th century, most clocks had one hand, striking the time by quarter-hour. Individual town times were called “apparent solar time.”

The oldest working clock is some 600 years old, an “astronomical clock” in Prague’s Old Town Square. It uniquely uses 24-hour time, and can still locate the Sun, Moon and stars; it is a collection of four distinct clock faces. One goes by Bohemian Time, used during the middle ages; a second face shows German Time, adopted in Europe in 1547, still in use today as Central European Time; a third face shows Ancient Babylonian Time, which divides daylight into twelve segments; the fourth face shows the Sun’s position in relation to Earth, day and night. (For these and other Times, see this website.)

Mean Time: Greenwich Melds Astronomers and Sailors. Navigation for thousands of years was by dead reckoning, using the stars. It was only by sighting stars that navigators could locate ships in terms of latitude (distance, north or south, from the equator) and longitude—distance, east or west, from a designated prime meridian. Mean Time was first used as a temporal yardstick in Geneva, in 1780; other Swiss towns followed suit. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was ultimately chosen by the British (rather than London) because the Greenwich observatory was used by the Astronomer Royal, a position established in 1675, to make accepted calculations. Setting up the system melded time and space in measurable distances and time zones.

By the late 19th century, 90 percent of the world’s shipping used the Greenwich prime meridian; the other 10 national prime meridians represented a mere 10 percent of global shipping traffic. Eight were centered on European cities (Paris, Berlin, Rome, Cadiz, Lisbon, Copenhagen, Stockholm and St. Petersburg), with Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo as outliers. Thus, Greenwich is situated at 0 degrees Longitude.

Standard Time: Railroad Timetables Defeat Farmer Stables. The first railroad time was London Mean Time, adopted in 1840 by Britain’s Great Western Railway. In 1848, Britain became the first entire country to adopt GMT. Its motive force was the dramatic increase in speeds of communication, via wire telegraph; and travel, via the steam engine. The Victorian Age was made possible by what Blaise calls the Age of Gauges, each of which is

. . . an intricate conversion device, a kind of translator between unspoken languages. Scales, thermometers, watches, fuel pumps . . . . Like crude computers, they monitor one set of operations and convert it to a different data flow—to time, to temperature, to volume, to cost, to profit, to depletion.

The dominant propulsion system on railway tracks was the locomotive, which could be steam-, electric-, or diesel-powered. On Oct. 6, 1829, Robert Stephenson’s “Rocket” steam locomotive, which incorporated myriad technical innovations, won a competition by drawing a 20-ton load 70 miles in 10 hours. Blaise notes that from the 1830s, rates of land/water travel increased geometrically—eventually, a hundredfold—what one historian called “a change in the rate of change.” Increasing speeds and distance covered gave birth to increasing travel confusion, as travelers saw their watches diverge more from local time.

In 1842, Toronto became the first city to draw its time computation by telegraph “magnetically signaled” from a nearby observatory; in 1848, Britain became the first country to put the entire country on one time signal, from the Greenwich Royal Observatory. In 1868 the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. followed suit for the entire U.S. As the industrial revolution spread throughout industry, the need for precise timing and convertible formats grew; the time-and-motion studies that drove Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” of mass production led to explosions in capitalist innovation, albeit at a high cost in worker health and welfare.

In 1845, Sandford Fleming sailed from Liverpool to Newfoundland; the trip took 48 days. His return trip, in 1863, aboard the steamer Great Eastern, took 8 days. The impetus for finally ending the worldwide dominance of “God’s Time” was when Fleming missed a Bandoran, Ireland train in the summer of 1876, due to a misprint in the schedule, as to AM or PM.

Each railroad had its own timetable and choice of time to follow. A passenger taking the train from Pittsburgh to Buffalo had to figure out all relevant timetables. Trains originating in Pittsburgh ran on Philadelphia time, adjusting for the sundial position, its five degrees of longitude set Pittsburgh clocks 20 minutes behind Philadelphia’s. But the Pittsburgh to Buffalo train originated in Columbus, Ohio, another three degrees longitude west, making for 12 additional minutes earlier. Arriving in Buffalo, the hapless traveler faced three different time zones, as Buffalo had three railroads serving it, and they all ran on different local times. Wisconsin operated with 38 different local times. Travelers riding the rails from Maine to California faced more than 20 timepiece adjustments. At mid-century, America had 144 different local times.

All this changed on April 8, 1883, at the General Time Convention of the American Railroad Association; fittingly, the meeting was held in St. Louis, where six official railroad times were observed. A railroad man, William Allen, offered a division of what became, by 1912, the 48 contiguous states, into four time zones, beginning at Longitudes 75, 90, 105 and 120 degrees: Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific. Adoption would replace 50 railroad time standards then prevailing. At 2 AM, Sunday, November 18, 1883, America’s railways migrated to a unified continent-wide standard time; the 2 AM conversion time was chosen because it would be least disruptive, as passenger loads were lowest, and hence fewer trains ran. Blaise notes that within days—astonishing given limited communications of the day—70 percent of schools, courts, and local governments adopted Standard Time. But the federal government did not accept the change until—NOT a misprint—1918.

The Oct. 1-22, 1884 Washington. D.C. Prime Meridian Conference (PMC) divided the 24-hour day into 24 time zones, each of roughly 1,000-miles distance; this enabled the 360-degree circumference of the Earth to be divided in 15-degree segments. Also defined then was the International Dateline, the universal day that reset the calendar, and the 24-hour clock. Solar time travelled from east to west, covering 12.5 miles per minute.

Wireless telegraphy and undersea cables greatly increased the need to track global time regularity. The first transatlantic cable linking Newfoundland and Britain operated briefly in 1856; two more durable cables were laid in 1866. Fleming’s crowning achievement came with the opening of the worldwide transpacific cable. In 1902 Fleming sent a pair of messages from Ottawa to Sydney, Australia, one eastward via Newfoundland, with intermediate routing via London, Gibraltar, Malta, Egypt, and India; and one westward via Vancouver, transiting to Sydney via Fiji. Australia replied to each message. Total transit times: eight hours. Blaise notes that the entire routing went through British territory—either Commonwealth countries of imperial colonies. (The apogee of the Empire upon which the sun never set was reached upon the British victory at Omdurman, Sudan, Sept. 1-2, 1898; one participant was a subaltern named Winston Spencer Churchill.)

Sunlight Time: DST’s Temporal Twists and Turns. Prerau marks 1444 as the first time that a clock was advanced one hour—not to save daylight, but to save the Swiss town of Basel. Invaders planned to attack when the town clock struck noon. The tower watchman learned of imminent attack and, unable to notify defenders in the minutes that remained, he manually advanced the clock by one hour. When the attackers heard only one bell rather than twelve, they were confused. Defenders rallied and drove them out of town. It was to be 472 years before Daylight Saving Time made its global debut, and it took a world war to force its adoption.

Having publicly rhapsodized over the joys of daylight in London (1757) and then while serving as an envoy in Paris (1784), Benjamin Franklin became the first to propose government action to address the matter. He did not, however, seek resetting of clocks. Rather, he proposed that the government impose a tax on shuttered windows when there is natural light outside; limit candle supplies; stop coaches after sunset; and ring all church bells upon first light, to wake everyone up.

Yet two problems remained unresolved: the rotation of the Earth’s axis, creating a series of sunrises and sunsets; and the 23.5-degree tilt of the Earth’s rotation, which alters daily the local time of sunrises and sunsets. Such seasonal variation gives us the winter and summer solstices, for the year’s shortest and longest days; and the vernal and autumnal equinoxes, when days and nights are 12 hours each, with local times varying daily between those dates.

The idea for seasonally-altered DST originated with a British MP, William Willett, whilst riding his horse one summer morning in countryside south of London; he rode alone, near his fellow townsfolk sleeping in Chislehurst. He thought if workers rose an hour earlier, they’d make use of natural light instead of working late in artificial light. Opposing the idea: farmers who needed to wait until after morning dew in order to harvest wheat; plus scientists and astronomers who rejected tampering with astronomical time. He brought his idea to Parliament in 1907, but it died there, as did subsequent efforts. When the House of Commons did pass a couple bills, each time the prime minster, Herbert Asquith, spoke against them. Willett died March 4, 1915, his dream unfulfilled.

Enter World War I. By then, World War I was in full swing. As the conflict widened and casualties mounted, wartime necessity required reducing unnecessary energy consumption, and keeping lights off an extra hour reduced demand for energy. First to adopt DST was Wilhelmine Germany, on April 6, 1916; other continental European nations rapidly followed suit. With Asquith ending his opposition to DST, it took Parliament all of six weeks to pass a DST bill, on May 15, 1916; the King consented two days later, and DST went into effect 2 AM Sunday, May 21. The Summer Time Act of 1916 had a provision authorizing renewal votes, and in 1917 renewal was made automatic for the duration of the War. Upon the Great War’s end (Nov. 11, 1918), when the Summer Time Act came up for renewal in 1919, it was dropped.

America was next. Two cities, Detroit (1907) and Cleveland (1909) were unhappy with being cast into the Central Time zone. They sought to have their cities included in the Eastern zone. Doing so would give their residents an extra hour of daylight year round. The Cleveland City

Council adopted Eastern Standard Time in 1914, with Detroit’s City Council following suit in 1915.

The first group to propose national adoption of DST was the National Daylight Association of Cincinnati. They approached President William Howard Taft two months after Taft entered the Oval Office; Taft and his Cabinet suggested that the group start locally, and later go to Congress.

Corporations and labor unions, often antagonists, united to push for DST. Railroads were content with Standard Time, and adamantly opposed imposition of the added complexity DST would add to their timetables. One argument they advanced was that there were 1,698,818 railroad clocks and watches that would have to be adjusted.

Things were in stasis until America entered the War on April 6, 1917. Congress stepped into the breach, but it was not until March 19, 1918 that President Wilson signed the Standard Time Act of 1918, which included the Daylight Saving Time Act; DST began on March 31, to run April through October. Detroit adopted Central Time for the months of DST, giving it two hours of added sunlight, but Cleveland, closer to the Eastern Time zone, did not. Upon the War’s end, immediately Congress sought to repeal DST. Twice President Wilson vetoed the bills, but the third time proved a charm. Passed by large majorities in both Houses, the second presidential veto was overridden, and on Aug. 20, 1919 Wilson signed the DST repeal bill.

Yet DST remained a live political issue: On May 23, 1922, a Washington, D.C. radio station broadcast the first-ever nationally broadcast political debate on DST. The audience decided who won (the author does not say).

But cities and states were still free to adopt local DST. In 1920, only two states, New York and Massachusetts, elected to keep DST. (In 1921, New York repealed statewide DST, but New York City kept it.) In 1926 the U.S. Supreme Court chimed in, per Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, dismissing a challenge to the constitutionality of the Massachusetts DST law. The aptly-named Connecticut town of Hazardville marked 1927 by adopting three local time zones: churches and shops adopted full DST; farmers kept EST; while mills, which dealt with both town and country, chose 30-minute DST.

South of Baltimore, where rural interests dominated until recent times, only Raleigh, North Carolina adopted DST, and only for four days in 1932. But by the late 1930s, 15 states with one-quarter of the population observed DST. The newly-formed (1934) Federal Communications Commission ruled that in areas where multiple radio stations shared spectrum frequency bands, if any local station followed Standard Time, all had to do so. When in Sept. 1938 a major (cat 3) hurricane rocketed up the east coast, slamming hardest into the northeast, the prevalence of DST aided recovery efforts.

During the interwar period (1919-1939), most European countries abandoned DST. Notable exceptions were Britain, which enacted permanent summer DST in 1925, and the Soviet Union, which adopted year-round DST in 1930.

Instant Replay: World War II. During World War II, the identical arguments that prevailed a quarter-century ago again did so, and DST was widely adopted. Britain extended its normal Summer Time, eventually running from late February to early November. After the war it reverted to peacetime DST, but the severe winter of 1947 forced adoption of emergency winter DST; in 1948 it reverted to Summer Time. America waited until after Pearl Harbor to return to DST; on Feb. 9, 1942 the country went on year-round DST, to be terminated six months after the War ended. A few localities did not follow suit. Congress decided not to wait for the six-month expiration, ending nationwide DST four weeks after V-J Day, on Sept. 30, 1945. But by 1947, 50 million Americans, about one-third the population, continued to observe DST.

Postwar Travails. The postwar period descended into what Time Magazine called, in 1963, “a chaos of clocks.” In 1964, DST began on 19 different dates and ended on 14 different dates. One year Iowa was saddled with 23 combinations of standard and DST; Hopkinton banks opened on DST and closed on standard time. Intercity bus service, at one point, took passengers through seven time zones–one change every eight minutes—during a 35-mile ride from Steubenville, Ohio to Moundsville, West Virginia! Rural dominates in northern Idaho took time variance to its logical end-point: observing—NOT making this up—door-to-door variances.

In the wake of the Time article, a movement for a nationwide return to summer DST gathered momentum, and in 1966 the Uniform Time Act of 1966 went into effect, but with a provision allowing states to exempt themselves upon passage of a state law. By 1971, four states—Arizona, Indiana, Hawaii and Michigan—had passed such laws. Indiana’s decision to allow two western areas to use CST, and the rest of the state to use EST, and also use DST in a single zone led Congress in 1972 to pass a specific exemption for such states. Eleven other states had multiple time zones, but none enacted partial DST zones.

The year 1973 was a genuine annus horribilis: the first Arab oil embargo, the summer Watergate hearings, resignation of the vice-president over corruption, and the firing of a special prosecutor investigating the president (only to be replaced by a new one). The term “energy crisis” entered the political lexicon. Once again, to conserve energy, Congress acted. The Emergency Daylight Saving Time Energy Conservation Act mandated a full two-year DST, from Jan. 1974 through Oct. 1975.

In the first two-weeks of Winter DST, schoolchildren were killed in the now-darker morning by cars in six states. But the killer of year-round DST was Florida, where over several weeks (presumably more than two) eight kids were killed, versus two during the same period in 1973. That did it. Photos of dead children aired on national television proved anew that pictures are worth a thousand words; there were no photos of kids who would have been hit by cars given darker afternoons, to provide a competing narrative.

Congress repealed year-round DST, with Standard Time resuming Oct. 27, 1974, and DST resuming Feb. 23, 1975. The Dept. of Transportation conducted a study that found three modest benefits from DST: energy conservation, traffic safety and crime reduction. Upon expiration of the 1973 bill, the nation returned to the 1966 UTA rules. A renewed push for longer DST began in 1984, driven by fast food businesses and recreational interests. The result was inclusion of a three-week extension of the advent of DST, to early April in the Federal Fire Prevention and Control Act of 1986.

21st Century Revival. In 2005, Congress passed a second extension of DST. With the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and energy conservation a major goal, the Act added five weeks to DST: four in March and one in November—the latter giving Halloween merchants and trick-or-treaters the benefits of twilight to better ward off evil spirits of darkness.

American DST now runs eight months, from early March though early November. Amtrak pauses its trains for one hour in the fall changeover, as trains cannot leave the station before their published scheduled departure; when DST resumes, trains depart at 2 AM Sunday, and try to make up lost time en route. Overseas, Continental Europe adopted uniform start and end times for DST in 1996, with Britain joining in 2002.

Sunlight Forever: Permanent DST? Several states, including California and Florida, have passed year-round DST, to go into effect if Congress adopts nationwide DST. On March 15, 2022, by unanimous voice vote the Senate passed the Sunshine Protection Act. To allow the railroads to adjust their timetables, the bill had set November 2023 as the date full DST was to be adopted—the clocks would not have been set back. Senators cited the inconvenience of changing clocks twice annually. But the DST bill died in the House.

Sen. Marco Rubio reintroduced the bill in the 118th Congress, on March 3, 2023; with Republicans now in control of the House, a companion bill was introduced by Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL), a move blocked by former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the 117th. The new bill exempts Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, the northern Marianas Islands, Guam, and American Samoa.If the new Congress adopts year-round DST, the earliest implementation would be November 2024; if done in the second year of the new Congress, implementation likely would be in November 2025.

Millennium Extravaganza. Worldwide time zones made possible a singular global event: the celebrations that collectively marked Millennium New Year, January 1, 2000. (Calendar purists complained that the true Millennium milestone would be January 1, 2001; the calendar went from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D.—there was no Calendar Year 0.)

Lucky viewers were able to watch celebrations serially as the year moved westward. The common denominator was Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), described as

Coordinated Universal Time—is the 24-hour time standard used as a basis for civil time today. All time zones are defined by their offset from UTC. The offset is expressed as either UTC- or UTC+ and the number of hours and minutes.

Primarily, UTC is based on mean solar time at the prime meridian running through Greenwich, UK. For every 15 degrees of longitude east or west, mean solar time changes by 1 hour. Two time components are added together to translate mean solar time to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC): International Atomic Time (TAI) measured by atomic clocks and Universal Time (UT1), the actual length of a day on Earth.

In theory, the UTC offsets countries use should reflect the local mean solar time. However, many time zone boundaries are distorted by geographical and political factors.

Claimants for the first to reach 2000 were legion, sundry islands located near the International Dateline (IDL), at UTC+14; the U.S. nuclear attack submarine Topeka (SSN 754) stationed herself at 400 feet depth underneath the intersection of the IDL and the equator. The first major industrial nation to cross the mark was New Zealand, at UTC+13. The last place to cross into the 21st century—uncontested—was Samoa, UCC-11. For those who arose at the proper hours, it was possible (the author did so) to observe myriad celebrations around the globe. It was an impressive and exciting demonstration of the interlinked wonders of communications and satellite broadcast technologies. displayed on viewers’ television sets.

Bottom (Time) Line. The 5,500 years since Egyptians first used the sundial to divide time into artificial segments have seen the growing need for precision—now, nano-precision. By 2005 much of the world had reached worldwide time-zone equilibrium, a process that formally began in 1883. Time precision grows of necessity, as billions of computers, phones and robots proliferate globally. The modern cesium-ion atomic clock carries precision to a measurement loss of one second every 10,000 years by using 20 billion pulses per second.

But the drive to make DST countrywide hinges not on the need for precision, but on desires for convenience and emotional equilibrium. The year-round DST bill’s chances in the 118th Congress may hinge on whether people in the fall hate four months of afternoon darkness more than they love an extra hour’s pre-dawn slumber.

John Wohlstetter is author of Sleepwalking With the Bomb (Discovery Institute Press, 2d. ed. 2014)

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Could Putin’s “Escalate to Win” Nuclear Threat Strategy Work?)

(Washington D.C.) The war against Ukraine initiated by Russian aggression 13 months ago has been accompanied by multiple threats from the Russian leadership, including President Putin, to initiate the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, NATO or Ukraine itself, threats that are linked to NATO support to Ukraine of military hardware.

The threats from Russia are taken as serious given Moscow’s adoption of a strategy often referred to as “escalate to win” where Russia decides to use limited nuclear weapons, probably of the theater or tactical type, in the Ukraine region to counter a losing conventional fight and achieve some kind of “victory” usually not clearly delineated. Thus, NATO has decided to split the difference: arm Ukraine with weapons but not involve NATO forces.

But there is a larger strategy at play and it involves both Russia and China.

First, irrespective of the outcome of the war against Ukraine, Moscow’s current gambit is to eventually secure the US withdrawal of theater nuclear weapons from a number of NATO nations where American fighter planes are armed with what are a couple of hundred nuclear gravity bombs.

Second, Putin’s ruse is to claim the moral high-ground by declaring that all Russian theater nuclear weapons are on Russian soil, unlike similar US nuclear weapons, not withstanding the fact that at a minimum Russian theater nuclear forces outnumber those of the United States by at least 10 to 1 or as much as 25 to 1.

Third, having a monopoly of theater nuclear forces in the European theater is Moscow’s objective, which would seriously tear apart of the fabric of the US extended deterrent or nuclear umbrella over our non-nuclear NATO allies. For its part, the US has never adopted a no-first use pledge but which some in Europe might believe was US policy by default if the US withdrew our theater nuclear forces from Europe. Even though it has also been long-standing US extended deterrent policy that our central strategic nuclear forces are a critical part of extended deterrence not only in the European theater but also in the Middle East and Western Pacific.

Fourth, Putin knows that Russian regional nuclear weapons can reach much of Europe, while US regional or theater nuclear forces if only stationed in the continental United States could not of course reach any part of Europe or western Russia. Such US forces would simply be a non-factor in any crisis or conflict having to do with the European-Russian border. Exactly Putin’s goal.

Fifth, this strategy is not exactly new. The Soviet Union previously and now Russia has centered its foreign policy strategy around one critical objective—destroy NATO and de-link the United States from Europe. This was the point of the Soviet era deployment of SS-20 missiles in Europe (and Asia) that the US responded to along with key NATO allies Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Italy when President Reagan deployed the Pershing and Ground-Launched Cruise missiles culminating in the surprise adoption by the USSR of Reagan’s arms proposal to zero out all such intermediate range forces in the INF Treaty of 1987.

Even though the Russians violated the INF treaty by deploying prohibited INF range missiles, it was not until the Trump administration that the US called Mocow on this and withdrew from the INF agreement. After all, you cannot have a bilateral treaty when there is only one party abiding by the agreement.

Sixth, Putin has also added a new twist to his campaign of nuclear blackmail. Citing the Ukraine coalition forces use of depleted uranium shells, Moscow has attempted to make the “aluminum” part of artillery shells somehow equivalent to using nuclear weapons. Putin has thus begun preparing a site in Belarus for the implicit “retaliatory” future deployment of Russian tactical nuclear weapons, in violation of numerous agreements to which Moscow is party.

The President of Belarus, Mr. Lukashenko, now claims he was unfairly pressured in 1991 to get rid of the Soviet era nuclear weapons located on Belarus soil when the Soviet Union collapsed. And that this somehow makes it consistent with sound strategic policy and law that Belarus can possibly host Moscow’s nuclear weapons planned for deployment later this summer.

Seventh, it is true that Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan all gave up their nuclear weapons at the break-up of the USSR, in return for a security guarantee from the West that their territorial integrity would be respected, a pledge Russia itself also adopted, including a formal agreement with Great Britain and the United States to protect Ukraine’s independence and security. Some analysts have suggested that the folly of giving up such weapons in 1991 [and by Libya and Iraq) is now clear, but without realizing that if the good guys we support—Ukraine—have a right to deploy nuclear weapons, the same argument can be made that the bad guys—whom we may be at war with including Iran, for example,—also can make a claim to have a right to deploy nuclear weapons as well because of potential aggression.

Apparently, China received a pledge from Putin at the summit of the two leaders that Russia would not deploy nuclear weapons outside of Russian territory, a pledge that Putin apparently would break if Moscow deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus. On the surface, it appears Putin broke his pledge but something more important is taking place that may explain Russia’s behavior.

China may have understood the pledge was good window dressing. But more importantly, China is worried the South Korean or ROK government is continuing to seek a stronger extended nuclear deterrent pledge from the United States, especially given the growing North Korean nuclear arsenal, both short range and longer range missiles and different types of nuclear weapons. The President of ROK while also pledging fealty to the NPT or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty that prohibits the ROK from developing its own nuclear weapons, has called for the US to redeploy American nuclear forces on the peninsula to counter the expanding North Korean nuclear threat, although it would not include nuclear weapons built by the ROK.

The US Department of Defense apparently opposes any deployment of US nuclear forces to the ROK territory. This is interestingly the opposite of China policy. In 1981, as former US Air Force Secretary Tom Reed revealed in his book, The Nuclear Express, that China’s leadership secretly and deliberately adopted a policy of transferring nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and Libya. An intact nuclear warhead may also have been transferred to Pakistan as part of such a deal. The A. Q. Khan network in Pakistan, what has been termed “Nukes R Us” facilitated the transfer of such weaponry, with the full support of the Pakistani government, which is allied with China against India.

China got what it wanted which was nuclear weapons in North Korea. Pakistan got help with ballistic missiles. China also hoped the North’s nuclear capability would split the ROK-USA-Japan alliance as conflicts would emerge among the three nations of the Pacific on how to deal with the North Korean threat. Unable to reach agreement of how best to counter the DPRK threats, China hoped the US would take the advice of Doug Bandow and others and withdraw our forces from the ROK in order not to involve the US in a possible war on the Korean peninsula. The argument being that a conflict could involve North Korean long-range rockets incinerating with nuclear weapons some portion of American cities such as Los Angeles or Seattle.

The result China hoped for has not materialized. In fact, the opposite has occurred. The ROK-Japan-US alliance is stronger. Australia has also become stronger especially with the agreement to deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines from the United States. Although Australia might sign the UN resolution to make nuclear weapons illegal and thus undermine the US extended deterrent just as it is being strengthened.

The worrisome Chinese buildup is both nuclear and conventional. China too has massively increased its naval shipbuilding and its advanced aviation. Most breathtaking as Admiral Charles Richard, who just retired from heading Strategic Command, explained, is China’s building of more than 400 land based ICBMs at least 360 of which are new. General Anthony Cotton, the new commander of Strategic Command explained in Congressional testimony that China is actually seeking nuclear superiority over the United States in some nuclear areas, and has surpassed the US already in the number of ICBM launchers in their nuclear force.

China, too, has regional or intermediate range missiles by the thousands. It may soon (2030-35) have 1500+ long range strategic nuclear weapons, compared to the minimum of 400-500 which is what they are reported to have today.

The Chinese Navy is larger than the US Navy and because of modernization and budget requirements, the US Navy and US Air Force is getting smaller first before the recently added funding for modernization bears the fruit of an expanded force structure toward the end of this decade. In even the best case, given currently projected defense budgets and plans, a second military window of vulnerability is opening between the US on the one hand and China on the other.

What then should the United States do? Well, when assessing both Russian expansion and modernization of their nuclear forces, some like James Acton are worried the Russian expansion and by implication the Chinese expansion are nuclear “gifts” that US hawks will use as the rationale to push for the expansion of US nuclear forces.

Other analysts such as Darrell Kimball of the Arms Control Association, has cleverly called for a nuclear freeze, originally a Soviet era 1979-80’s idea from Moscow soundly rejected by the US and the Reagan administration. A freeze on warheads even today would give Russia and China as much of an advantage of 8500 to 3400 warheads over the United States.

Ironically, if adopted by Washington, a freeze would actually be an American gift bonanza to Moscow and China. First, Russia has completed the modernization of its nuclear forces to the 90+% level according to the Kremlin; (2) China would expand its forces while a freeze were being negotiated making the strategic balance worse; and (3 disarmament advocates would do everything to stop US modernization as the US is now just beginning to bend metal and build submarines, bombers and ICBMs, all of which as nuclear platforms get initially deployed later in this decade.

As the disarmament community argued in 1981, a hoped for freeze deal would of course have to pause or freeze the US nuclear modernization effort, and not “further” upset the strategic balance. And of course, in 1981, the US was just beginning the nuclear modernization effort of “peace through strength” even as the USSR was toward the completion of another nuclear modernization effort.

Without a monopoly of regional nuclear weapons in Europe and the Western Pacific, Putin and Xi may not be confident they can achieve their objectives including destroying Ukraine independence and engulfing Taiwan into the PRC, even if needed to do so by force.

Senators Roger Wicker and Jim Risch, the ranking members of the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees, respectively, recently made the important point that removing nuclear weapons from Ukraine was part of an explicit guarantee of Ukraine security. Providing weapons to Ukraine does not violate that agreement, in fact it reinforces it and thus the US is now treating Putin’s nuclear threats as bluff. But within limits.

The US and NATO also know that if NATO forces directly engage Russia, as opposed to military weaponry used by Ukraine, then all sorts of red lines get broken and a nuclear conflict becomes a big possibility. However, as Senators Jim Risch and Roger Wicker also explained in a seminar at the Hudson Institute, yielding to nuclear blackmail re arming Ukraine will simply invite more blackmail. And while we are providing assistance there has to be a strategy to win and the means available to do so. Here the US nuclear deterrent must be second to none. To deter Putin from using nuclear weapons in the Ukraine region or beyond and China from using nuclear weapons in the Western Pacific as well.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.

(This article was written by Peter Huessy and appeared in Warrior Maven. Inside the Nuclear Threat: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran)

(Washington D.C.) North Korea has fired over 100 ballistic missiles of all kinds in the past 12 months over or near Japanese and South Korean territory, some seven-fold greater than in the previous half-decade.

China has built 360 new ICBM silos in Western China, now exceeding the number of ICBM launchers in the United States, while sending a surveillance balloon across the United States in violation of American sovereign airspace.

Iran has according to the United Nation’s IAEA enriched uranium to 84%, within a few percent of the weapons grade fuel needed for a nuclear warhead, sufficient quantities of which they can produce in a month for a dozen warheads.

And Russia continues to threaten the use of nuclear force against the US, NATO and Ukraine should the US not refrain from supplying weapons to Ukraine and have recklessly forced down a USAF surveillance drone operating in international waters.

And so, this is the news in early 2023 as the United States intelligence community seeks to “connect the threat dots” and calculate the threats the country faces. While cataloguing specific actions or “dots” makes some sense by what one might describe as the “four brothers mayhem”, there is rarely a strategy framework discussed from which the American people can judge the seriousness of events.

For example, media descriptions are usually of the “look at this additional provocation” variety when describing missile tests, for example. But actually, the Russians and Chinese, Iranian and Korean hostile acts are not to provoke the US to retaliate in kind and attack. The very opposite in fact. The four hostile nations are seeking to divide the US alliances in the Western Pacific, in central Europe, and in the greater Middle East. And to persuade the US to retreat in any future military crisis, and to force the United States to withdraw from key geographic regions where the United States military now regularly operates.

The strategy and objectives of Russia, China, North Korea and Iran also cannot be ameliorated by more talking or diplomacy or arms control. Talking about peace does nothing about these nations arming for war. Though the four may not want to fight the United States, they want to fight Ukraine, Taiwan, South Korea or Saudi Arabia and other Gulf State Arab nations, but without the US military presence. Winning without fighting is not as some would believe not fighting. It is not fighting the United States with its very formidable conventional and nuclear forces. But it is fighting our allies.

Russia is trying to intimidate the US from sending advanced weaponry to Ukraine, and to a degree Moscow’s threats have succeeded to truncate or delay US military assistance to Ukraine in a timely manner.

North Korea’s continued belligerence has certainly strengthened the US-ROK-Japanese alliance, creating conditions under which the three Pacific alliance partners have significantly enhanced military preparedness, spurred on by what the ROK population sees as a weakness in the US extended deterrent.

China has run roughshod over international rules in the South China Sea, and repeatedly violated US and Taiwanese airspace, while building motors for Iranian drones provided to Russia for use in Ukraine, while building a coercive nuclear capability to help push the United States around, while seeking at least in part superior nuclear capability than the United States.

As for Iran, its Navy ships visited Brazil and it has exercised its military with the Chinese and Russians, while massively supporting its own major military buildup by deploying the largest inventory of missiles of any nation in the Middle East.

The most important central characteristic of each nation’s recent behavior has not been its relative recklessness although that has been present. But their uniform pursuit of what Dr. Keith Payne has called “nuclear coercion” —threatening to use nuclear weapons to secure the fruits of aggression even as the four mayhem brothers seek to keep the United States from entering any conflict on the part of its allies—whether Ukraine, South Korea, Taiwan or Israel.

Of further importance is that the four nations are cooperating along the lines of joint military operations, exercises and arms sales.

Without a robust presence in the Pacific, the US cannot protect Taiwan or have a leadership role in the direction of the five billion people and $55 trillion in GDP the Indo-Pacific will achieve in the next two decades. While North Korean aggression can deflect the US attention from Taiwan, China can move against the island along with help from a cooperative Russia.

As for Europe, Russia in turn has hoped to strip NATO of its eastern most members, starting with engulfing Ukraine from which it could open all of eastern Europe to once again become Russian satellites unwilling to help the United States keep Europe safe and whole. While adding 40 million Ukraine citizens plus very large natural gas and grain resources to Moscow’s exchequer to make up in part for the declining Russian population and economy.

Iran and its missile inventory and eventual nuclear weapons could then cement its domination of Syria, Yemen, Iraq and Lebanon, and from these centers of military power, surround Saudi Arabia and other western allied Gulf States and thus have hegemonic control over 75% of the world’s conventional hydrocarbons. This would provide China with its long sought guaranteed access to petroleum and natural gas supplies at preferential prices.

And also, hep allied Russia with indirect control over the oil and gas of the region which Moscow—not a member of OPEC but one of the largest exporters of petroleum in the world– has referred to as Russia’s patrimony. With such vast oil resources under indirect Russian/Chinese control, the world’s reserve currency could then switch from the US dollar to the Chinese renminbi, a long sought objective of the CCP.

Finally, the four rogue states can also make life miserable for the United States in our own hemisphere. Iran Navy vessels have docked in Brazil and have long reported to be interested in building a missile base in Venezuela, the exact distance from which an Iranian Sahab missile can reach Miami. China controls access to both ends of the Panama Canal and is building a new base on the Atlantic coast of Africa from which to project power across the ocean.

Geographic control over key real estate is critical to the successful implementation of the grand hegemonic strategy of these four nations or “brothers’ mayhem”. There is, however, certainly nothing inevitable about their success. But there is no automatic “arc of history” that bends toward the US and its allies. For liberty and freedom to prevail requires a counter strategy rooted in a realistic understanding of how serious these brutal dictatorships are about their goals, and how US political, diplomatic, economic and military capabilities must be brought to the struggle for the US to prevail.

Peter Huessy is a Senior Fellow at the Gold Institute for International Strategy, a Washington D.C.-based foreign policy and defense think tank.