48 



irrigation systems with electric circuits representing the 

 different canals and the different dams. Condensers 

 separated the dams and flashing lights! I never really 

 understood it very well. 



Sharp: It sounds like something AID might have liked to see. 



Revelle: Probably, yes. Well, it was an old-fashioned method for 

 studying water resources systems . These have lots of 

 interacting relationships with each other. 



For example, suppose you put water into a canal, 

 you've got to be sure that it gets into the fields, it just 

 doesn't run out the other end of the canal. You only put in 

 so much water. The problem with a dam in over-season 

 storage is that you never know during the season how much 

 water you're going to have from rain and runoff. So they 

 have to be careful not to empty the dam too soon, but on the 

 other hand to have a lot of room in the dam in case they 

 have a flood. 



It's amazing how complicated and difficult these 

 decisions are, and they have to, of course, be robust, the 

 system has to be robust so you can take account of large 

 variations which you can't predict. 



Michaels, I don't remember him very well. I'm not 

 sure that he was much involved with the panel . Bower and 

 Reeve were at the US Salinity Laboratory at Riverside. 



So if you look at this list, you can see that 

 Blandford Bower, Langbein, Lukes, Maddock, Reeve, Skibitske, 

 and Wadleigh, were all government servants, civil servants, 

 in the Geological Survey or in the Department of 

 Agriculture. Revelle, Brinser, Burden, Dorfman, Corner, 

 Isaacs, Michaels, Thomas, and Todd were all university 

 types, university faculty members. And than Eckis and 

 Blandford and Katz were from industry, outside universities 

 anyhow. It was a rather mixed bag of twenty people. 



The panel was, as I say, assembled. I didn't choose 

 them. I chose some of them. Harvey Brooks chose many of 

 them. We first met in Washington with the engineers who 

 were working on the developments under the Indus Waters 

 Treaty. 



We must say a word about the Indus Waters Treaty. At 

 the time of partition, one cause for conflict that was real 

 and serious was the fact that the headwaters of all the 

 streams that irrigated the Indus Plain rose in India, all 

 the tributaries of the Indus River. 



Geographical and Historical Notes on the Indus River Area 



Sharp: I brought this map. That's from your article. It helped me 

 to visualize, [brings out map]* 



Revelle: Well, let's just look at it a minute. This is the Indus 



