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(Written by Jamie Dettmer) The clock is ticking towards the British-set deadline of midnight Tuesday for the Kremlin to explain why a Russian developed military-grade nerve agent was used to poison a former Russian double agent and his daughter in a small cathedral town in south England.

No one in the British government is holding their breath for a Russian response — or an adequate one, from London’s point of view.

And as the deadline looms British officials are scrambling to garner the support of Western allies, and they appear ready, if necessary, to invoke NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense, which has only been invoked once before in the Western alliance’s 59-year history.

In her statement before a somber House of Commons Monday saying it was “highly likely” the Kremlin had authorized the March 4 poisoning of Sergei Skripal, a former Russian military intelligence officer recruited by Britain’s foreign intelligence service MI6, and his 33-year-old daughter, British Prime Minister Theresa May chose her words carefully.

She angled her words, say her aides, so as to be able to widen the international dimension of the unfolding political and diplomatic crisis that’s plunging Anglo-Russian relations to their lowest point since the Cold War.

“Should there be no credible response, we will conclude that this action amounts to an unlawful use of force by the Russian State against the United Kingdom,” May said in a key legal paragraph in her statement.

The law

Under international law, a state that’s been the victim of the unlawful use of force by another is allowed to respond. By carefully choosing her phrase, May indicated she is treating the attempted assassination of the Skripals not as a criminal act but as a state-sponsored attack on Britain as a whole.

That also prepares the ground for Britain to follow America’s example in the wake of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks on New York and Washington D.C. and invoke article 5 of the 1949 NATO treaty, which states: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all” and that they should work together to ‘restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.”

Well, this is probably gonna get interesting.

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cathedral town

Rainbow Dash laughs because the presence of a cathedral has been literally the main factor which is used to officially upgrade a town to a city in the UK for hundreds of years. (There are only about half a dozen exceptions to this rule.)