Grace Penn orders U.S. warships toward the U.K. in Austin Dennison The Diplomat, pushing the Poseidon crisis into open military brinkmanship. Kate Wyler is left carrying the order as Britain and Russia confront the fallout from the missing nuclear weapon.
Grace Penn and Poseidon
The crisis began after the United States secretly took Poseidon from a Russian submarine off the English coast, while Britain and Russia did not know the weapon had been removed. During negotiation talks, Hal Wyler told Nicol Trowbridge what the United States had done, and Kate Wyler then blackmailed Trowbridge into staying quiet before he resigned from his post.
Bethan Vaughn became prime minister after Trowbridge stepped down, then let Russia retrieve the bodies of the soldiers who died on the submarine. Grace Penn told Kate to urge Vaughn to change her mind or she would send warships to do it for her, and Todd later said, "they will shoot at anything that tries to get past."
London and D.C.
Kate, Hal, Miguel Gannon, and Billie Appiah all tried to reason with Grace Penn, but Grace refused to back down even though her own cabinet warned that sending U.S. warships and firing on Russian vessels could lead to nuclear war. The deployment order also put Stuart Hayward at the center of the rupture: he filed a report in the internal sanctioned dissent channel and Grace removed him from his post in London, sending him back to D.C.
Grace had already been shot during a trip to the U.K. early in the season, and that history sits behind the sharper edge of her decisions now. Kate and Hal suggested that the United States and the U.K. retrieve the dead for Russia to avoid violence, but Grace kept the pressure on Vaughn as the group traveled to Italy for the G7 summit.
G7 summit morning
On the morning of the G7 summit, Kate learned more about the situation, which leaves the next step with Grace Penn rather than with the people trying to slow her down. The immediate question is whether Grace keeps the warships moving or accepts the compromise that would let the dead be retrieved without a wider confrontation.
