In looking at the boom years ahead for submarine design and construction at Electric Boat, I couldn't help but remember when the job graph was going the other way.

As the job hemorrhaging at Electric Boat occurred a few decades ago, the new southeastern Connecticut casinos, first Foxwoods and then Mohegan Sun, started to pick up the slack.

Indeed, even people who were cautious about the opening of Foxwoods here in the early '90s — essentially the first of its kind in the country outside Las Vegas and Atlantic City — saw the job creation as a silver lining.

Some displaced Electric Boat workers retrained and changed careers. The pay was less in many cases, but there was a new job safety net here for those who couldn't or didn't want to move on.

The southeastern Connecticut casinos eventually added grandly to the regional economy, drawing outside money to slot machines and table games and recirculating it in payrolls and purchasing.

Today, the same seesaw is about to go up and down on different sides, with the momentum in job creation certainly going EB's way.

The southeastern Connecticut casinos will be starved of customers — not only by the new MGM Springfield in Massachusetts, but also possibly by an East Windsor casino to be run by the two southeastern Connecticut tribes themselves.

Never mind what will happen when Steve Wynn's enormous new destination casino resort opens in metropolitan Boston.

You will be able to roll bowling balls through the casino gaming floors here. The tribes admitted as much in their pitch to build East Windsor.

So there will certainly be fewer casino jobs in the region, and some local casino workers will no doubt migrate to new jobs in East Windsor, or maybe to Electric Boat.

But worse, our local casinos may become more of just that, serving locals and not bringing anywhere near as much outside money into the local economy.

I wish the tribes well in their East Windsor venture — after all, the meltdown was inevitable here anyway — but I wouldn't say it is necessarily a winning strategy.

First, we are about to see a legal bombardment from MGM that I suspect will be bare-knuckle and brutal. There certainly could be an injunction at the outset to stop East Windsor from even getting off the starting line. And the state could end up on the hook for MGM's vast legal bills, if it loses.

And then there is the tribes' business strategy.

Will northern Connecticut gamblers forgo the short drive to MGM's glamorous new $900 million destination resort casino cleverly built into downtown Springfield and go to the tribes' $300 million convenience casino instead? Hard to know.

I sometimes pick up a quart of milk at the gas station, but I usually make the trip to the supermarket.

I'm glad it is not my $300 million bet that I can take out a water cannon with a squirt gun.

If I were the Mohegans, I might have considered spending that money instead on resort and entertainment attractions that they seem to be able to only dream of now for the Norwich Hospital property.

The tribe has moved to buy the property but all the talk of development hinges now on finding partners to do the actual development.

I wish them luck with that, too.

Both tribes are fighting other headwinds, with the Mashantucket Pequots in a much deeper hole with creditors.

The Mohegans are busy developing a casino in South Korea, right in the cross hairs of a developing international standoff with nuclear consequences.

The South Korean casino is for foreign tourists — locals will not be allowed to gamble — and China, which was supposed to supply a lot of those gamblers, has issued a travel ban to South Korea because of the missiles fight.

What tourist wants to go to South Korea right now, anyway?

If the tribes were made of publicly traded stock, it would likely be at a new low now.

Thank goodness for submarines and job seesaws.

This is the opinion of David Collins.

d.collins@theday.com