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The issue he raised is central to figuring out what we truly pay for a gallon of gas. The BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico has reminded Americans that the price at the pump is only a down payment; an honest calculation must include the contamination of our waters, land, and air. Yet the calculation remains incomplete if we don’t consider other factors too, especially what might be the largest externalized cost of all: the military one. To what extent is oil linked to the wars we fight and the more than half-trillion dollars we spend on our military every year? We are in an era of massive deficits, so it pays to know what we are paying for and how much it costs.

The debate often hovers at a sandbox level of did-so/did-not. Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, insisted the invasion of Iraq had “nothing to do with oil.” But even Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, rejected that line. “It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows,” Greenspan wrote in his memoir. “The Iraq war is largely about oil.” If it is even partly true that we invade for oil and maintain a navy and army for oil, how much is that costing? This is one of the tricky things about oil, the hidden costs, and one of the reasons we are addicted to the substance — we don’t acknowledge its full price.

If we wish to know, we can. An innovative approach comes from Roger Stern, an economic geographer at Princeton University who in April published a peer-reviewed study on the cost of keeping aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf from 1976 to 2007. Because carriers patrol the gulf for the explicit mission of securing oil shipments, Stern was on solid ground in attributing that cost to oil. He had found an excellent metric. He combed through the Defense Department’s data — which is not easy to do because the Pentagon does not disaggregate its expenditures by region or mission — and came up with a total, over three decades, of $7.3 trillion. Yes, trillion.

A UAE Coast Guard source confirmed Friday that the tanker, M. Star, was the target of a terrorist attack while passing through international waters near the Strait of Hormouz on July 28.

”UAE explosives experts who collected and examined samples found a dent on the starboard side above the water line and remains of homemade explosives on the hull,” the source said. “Probably the tanker had encountered a terrorist attack from a boat loaded with explosives.”

On Wednesday, an al Qaeda-linked group called “Abdullah Azzam Brigades” issued an online statement claiming that M. Star was the target of a kamikaze attack orchestrated by the group. It identified the suicide bomber as Ayyub al-Taishan. The group said that he blew himself up into the tanker in the Straight of Hormouz, between the U.A.E and Oman, causing major damage to the giant ship, which was carrying two million barrels of crude oil.

Bradley Birkenfeld was one of the few Americans who held the keys to the kingdom. A Boston-born, high-flying, cross-border banker at Switzerland’s premier financial institution, UBS, he had access to the kind of secret account information that American law enforcement had only dreamed of through all the decades that terrorists, dictators, arms dealers, mafia dons and wealthy tax cheats had hidden behind the fortress of secrecy that Swiss banking promised.

Subterranean bomb-proof vaults and state-of-the-art security systems are the superficial trappings of Swiss banking and its culture of secrecy, but the cornerstone of protection for its clients is the numbered account system that offers all but foolproof privacy. Or so they thought.

At UBS, clients’ names and their account information are divided irreconcilably between separate computer servers in secret locations. Even for a world-class hacker with free roam of electronic bank records, identifying the owner of a numbered account is literally “Mission: Impossible.” Nowhere do names and numbers appear side-by-side.

At vaunted UBS, the only seam of vulnerability resided in nothing more advanced than the kind of old-school card catalog you might find in a local library.

At the start of business each morning, private bankers like Birkenfeld, then a director in the wealth management division of UBS, would check in at combination vaults to pull their “racks” — wooden trays of 4×5 paper index cards that are the Achilles heel of Swiss secrecy. Printed on each confidential client card — in plain, unencrypted typeset — is the client’s name, account and safety deposit box numbers, the fees paid, and home addresses and unique passwords — secret challenge phrases known only to the banker and the client that are used to verify identity on the phone (“Rose and Eagle” on a surreptitiously photocopied card Birkenfeld showed me).

“If I was really devious … I would have just taken my gym bag, slid them in, walked out the door, hopped on a plane,” Birkenfeld laughed during our interview.

…

The information Bradley Birkenfeld eventually provided — first to the DOJ, then to investigators from the IRS, SEC, Department of Treasury and U.S. Senate — would set off cascading criminal and civil investigations into UBS. Within two years, it would bring down UBS’ entire U.S. cross-border banking division and compel intensive negotiations between the highest levels of the American and Swiss governments.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Kazakhstan and Belarus should also suspend shipments as Russia announced a ban on grain exports from Aug. 15 to yearend. “It’s got $10 written all over it,” said Peter McGuire, managing director at CWA Global Markets Pty, who on Aug. 3 correctly forecast the surge to $8.50. Wheat was last at $10 in March 2008, and a gain to that price would be up 23 percent from yesterday’s close.

Russia’s ban may benefit rival producers, including the U.S., the largest exporter, Australia and Argentina, according to Rabobank. Wheat prices have doubled in less than two months as drought slashed the harvest in Russia, the third-largest grower, and rains cut Canadian output. The surge may herald a new food crisis as corn and other staples jump, said a trade group from Indonesia, Asia’s top wheat buyer.

Nadeem Ahmed, chairman of the National Disaster Management Authority, said that the figure only applied to the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and central Punjab provinces, with figures from the southern Sindh province not yet available.

Previous estimates had said that four million Pakistanis have been affected, a reflection of the rapidly growing scale of the disaster.

The new figures come as Pakistan braces for yet more rains in areas already badly hit by torrential monsoon downpours that have caused devastation, washing away villages and destroying swathes of agricultural land.

“We’re forecasting widespread rains in the country, especially in flood-affected areas,” Qamar-uz-Zaman Chaudhry, director general of Pakistan’s meteorological department, said.