Second heading: on time. Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, praised the decision and gave thanks. Yet he also warned that the agreement stipulates deliveries may begin only after some years. The Daily Mail writes that they may not arrive before 2032, and American officials have fixed no date of delivery. Zelensky, for his part, asked for a hundred interceptors a month through the winter. He also urged the allies to hand over at once the missiles they already hold in their arsenals, to be replaced later from this purchase.

Third heading: on measures. Defense News reports, on Zelensky's authority and from air force figures, that more than a hundred ballistic missiles were fired at Kyiv and the surrounding region within two weeks, and nearly three thousand five hundred jet-powered drones across all Ukraine in September. On Thursday, as the Daily Mail relates, a Russian drone killed at least fourteen people on a crowded railway platform in Dnipro. Each PAC-3 costs roughly three million eight hundred thousand dollars, and the war the Americans and Israelis are waging against Iran is said to have drained about two-thirds of the prewar stock. Now I reckon, as a curator does: five hundred missiles, issued at a hundred a month, are spent in five months. That is one winter, and not a whole one. Divide the total price, and each missile comes to more than four million. Where the difference arises the reports do not say; were I curator, I would ask that first.

This is the fault I caught so often in the waters: a pipe entered in the records and never laid in the ground. No one drinks from that water, and no one is sheltered by such a shield. The Saguntines were once besieged with all the enemy's force while embassies were sent to Rome and the senate deliberated; the senate's decrees did not defend their walls, for the city fell before help set sail. Missiles promised for 2032 are of the same kind. Glorious in the gazette, idle on the ramparts, like those works I once set beside our aqueducts: "With so many indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle pyramids, or the useless though famous works of the Greeks."

Fourth heading: who gains. The allies pay money now and will receive iron years hence. The factories across the Ocean have a great contract let at other men's expense. I do not allege fraud, which no report charges; I allege an unequal arrangement, under which the water does not flow before the price is paid, but the price flows before the water. Add to this that, as the Daily Mail reports, a quarrel flared this very month between Washington and Kyiv over a diesel deal struck with the Russians, over slowed access to satellite services, and over intelligence withheld. The quarrel was calmed only after talks in Oslo on October 20. He who drinks from so changeable a spring goes thirsty at its pleasure.

Fifth heading: what I commend. Defense News relates that Ukraine has completed its share of the Freyja project. This is a shield against ballistic missiles which Europe is building with Kyiv. The firm Fire Point has built the FP-7.X interceptor and its launcher; Norway's Kongsberg and Germany's Diehl Defence must supply the parts that find, track and guide. Ten countries take part, Zelensky said. Iryna Terekh, the firm's chief, has affirmed that a work which usually takes twenty or thirty years is being compressed into a few. This I approve. Appius Claudius brought his own water; he did not buy another's. A people that uses its own spring lives under its own laws. But the burden now rests on the partners, who have not yet delivered their components, and half a work serves no one.

The remedy, as with the waters, is simple and not new. First, what Zelensky himself proposed: let water be diverted from full reservoirs into the empty one; let missiles be given now from the allies' arsenals, and let the contract replace them later. Next, let it be published each month how many interceptors have been delivered, not how many promised. Then let the partners finish without delay what they owe to Freyja. Lastly, let no one raise himself a monument from this sale before a single missile stands in Ukraine. A wall is defended by stone, not by an agreement; and a shield written in a ledger stops no spear.