Except they aren't. Even the submitted articles, tendentious as they are, admit that the trucks are not ordinary. They are also under constant escort by a pair of SUVs that contain god knows what, which the articles omit for whatever reason. Beyond that, I'd say the concerns over Pakistan stem as much from this..

..(From the first article you linked to, FYI) than from any superficial similarities in the ways that the US and Pakistan transport nuclear materials.

I know what you mean. I remember that after reading the preface of the first of the WOT books he wrote, I didn't know whether I was going to be able to continue. I held my nose until the literary equivalent of olfactory fatigue set in, and now I'm actually looking forward to the final installment.

Even though I'm sure more evaporation occurs during the daytime, he runs the sprinklers continuously. I honestly don't know why.

I was going to speculate, but as I thought about it, I realized that there more constraints than I first realized. It's possible to both under-water, and over-water, of course. There's a limit to the flowrate of water he can supply. The sprinkler, even on 100% speed, takes (IIRC) approximately a day to make a full revolution. Watering continuously might be the only way to satisfy all the constraints, even if he does lose significantly more water to evaporation during the day.

Unfortunately, even though I grew up on a farm, I don't know that much about the reasons behind the decision making. My dad kept all that to himself. I just did what I was told. :)

Yes, I understand that ground water is being depleted. So do most farmers. As the links you posted point out, diminishing ground water leads to higher pumping costs, both because it has to be pumped from deeper under ground, and because wells which used to be very reliable have to have work done on them (acid treatments, shooting, etc) or abandoned entirely. New water wells can be incredibly expensive in areas where the water table is hundreds of feet beneath the surface. That's what's driving investment in fancy equipment to reduce water usage, like computer-controlled center pivot sprinklers.

I think I'm probably guilty of reading too much between the lines of your first comment, but a couple of things about it set me off. First, the assertion that we consume "too much" water because its low price causes us to misperceive its true value. Actually, I agree with you to some extent. Water is being inefficiently used by farmers because, for one thing, the government has its thumb on the scale. Farmers are incentivized by ag subsidies to produce certain crops like corn in quantities that far exceed free market demand. Water usage that couldn't be justified at the free market price of corn can be justified when the government is paying for it.

But, I don't think that's actually what you meant. I think you really believe (or at least you assume without thinking carefully) that water has some kind of inherent value independent of what people are willing to pay for it. Here's the part where I'm really reading between the lines: Usually after someone says a thing like that, they follow it up with "Thar oughtta be a law!" that "corrects" this imbalance in what people are paying versus what water is "truly" worth. Because if we don't, all the drinkable water will run out. It's an argument related in many ways to "peak oil" alarmism that has continued without abeyance for decades now, despite being repeatedly proven wrong by history.

The point I wanted to make is, look, market forces are already taking care of this. Obtaining water is more expensive than it used to be, and farmers are investing in giant, sensationally expensive sprinklers to use less water. And the world keeps turning. Ten or fifty years from now, when there's even less water available at the current price, who knows what it will become economical to pursue? Solar concentrators driving desalination plants. Actual water recycling. Maybe we'll finally be rid of the damn ag subsidies. We don't need anyone telling us what the "true" value of water is to make it last or to prevent us from "over consuming." Prices do that already, when the government doesn't get in the way.

Second, I detected an undercurrent of "greedy American bastards!" in your comparison. I apologize if I'm wrong, but you have to admit that such comparisons are de rigueur. As I pointed out, prices have driven American farmers to adopt the same technology for conserving water that people with a lot of money use in the desert. In fact, I rather suspect the flow of technology occurred in the opposite direction.

1. That's a typical method of irrigation in the US only in the loosest sense of the word 'typical'. What you've managed to find is a picture of an antique. My dad has a 20-year-old center pivot sprinkler that has low pressure dropped nozzles to reduce evaporation and soil compaction as much as possible, and it was old technology even back then. Center pivot means just what it sounds like. One end is fixed, and the other end goes around in a giant circle.

The nozzles on these machines vary in size from the center (i.e. near the pivot) to the end. Think about it: The drops near the pivot go around the circle much more slowly than those on the end, and so if the nozzles were all the same size, a lot more water would be put out near the center. Also, the water pressure is higher there since it hasn't undergone friction losses through the length of the sprinkler. During the first summer that my dad owned that machine, I remember walking down it several times with a dot matrix print out in one hand and a bucket of nozzles in the other, replacing them one at a time to try to evenly distribute the supply of water as much as possible.

A half-mile-long sprinkler was (again, 20 years ago) an $80K investment over the former, low-tech system of row irrigation, and he was and is not an especially wealthy farmer. Why would he go to so much expense and trouble? In part because one of his largest expenses is pumping costs, and center pivot irrigation makes much more efficient use of water, overall.

2. I am not personally familiar with Qanats, but they appear to be a water collection and storage method, not a method of irrigation. It was surprising difficult to find quantitative information about irrigation in the middle east, but after several minutes of googling, I did find this brief, UN-produced report on irrigation in Saudi Arabia. It claims, in part:

Oh.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that horses are "a lot" cheaper, especially long term. They continue to self-fuel (and require frequent maintenance) even when not in use.

What makes you so confident? They have in the past. The Soviet Union was officially an atheist state and severely persecuted religious people. The same remains true of China. Lest you believe this is all behind us, Richard Dawkins has said (more than once, I believe) that religious instruction is a form of child abuse. One implication of his view is that the state should remove children of religious parents from their homes and lock the parents up, because that's how we treat child abuse. Take a look at this comment, too. (When I first read it, it was marked +5 Insightful.) People say that kind of stuff online all the time. Can you imagine what would happen if that point of view became really popular in "real life"? Hint: What do we do with the mentally ill?

Oh, it's simple. The senator has an R after her name, and yet she is calling for a scientific examination of one of the TSA's policies. The submitter hates the TSA, but he also knows that Republicans hate science and that he hates them. The prospect of a Republican supporting the use of science to accomplish something good creates an obvious tension in the submitter's way of looking at the world. He chose to resolve it by impugning the Senator's credentials in a completely irrelevant way.

Maybe be aware of it so that they won't be taken by surprise when their own leaders attempt something similar, perhaps at the behest of the US State Department, which has a history of meddling in the laws of other nations regarding precisely this issue?

The speed that it wants to? You realize that science doesn't do itself, right? Ego has always been one of the chief reasons that human beings, who are to a man petty and selfish, do science. The Royal Society invented many practices like peer review that we now consider to be necessary components of the scientific process. One of the reasons that it established Philosophical Transactions, which was the very first modern scientific journal, was to resolve disputes about who did what first. If you were to somehow remove ego from the equation, I think we'd have very few working scientists. There just aren't that many people sufficiently motivated by pure altruism to do it for very long without recognition.