The Tennessee River has plenty of water. And the state of Georgia has plenty of legal ammunition to move the state line and get it.

These more or less are the marching orders set forth in the "Confidential Water Policy Memorandum." Released Friday, the document ratchets up the talk of border war between Georgia and Tennessee.

The 18-page memorandum — drawn up in recent months by lawyers, politicians and water engineers — was the basis of resolutions in the Georgia state legislature this week to move the Tennessee line a mile north to the 35th parallel.

That would put part of the Tennessee River in Georgia and possibly set in motion the building of a water treatment plant, pumping stations and a 100-plus-mile pipeline to move as much as 500 million gallons of water a day to north Georgia and Atlanta.

Though the Tennessee line has been where it is since an erroneous survey of 1818, legal precedents indicate the U.S. Supreme Court would likely rule that the line should be moved to the 35th parallel, where Congress intended it to be, the document says.

The memorandum argues that cases and legislative action going as far back as 1802 and as recently as 1990 form the legal bedrock for Georgia's case.

It also cites a Tennessee Valley Authority study from 2004 that says Georgia could draw 264 million gallons of water a day from the Tennessee and not hurt reservoir levels or downstream users.

Mike Eiffe, the TVA's program manager for water supply, confirmed the 264 million figure but said his authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would not automatically approve such a large withdrawal.

On Friday, Tennessee House Speaker Gary Odom acknowledged that the dispute — so far mostly banter and whimsy — is starting to draw real fire and ire.

"It's a serious allegation to make that the border has been wrong since 1818," Odom said. He added that legal opinions he had read and heard indicated Tennessee likely would prevail if the dispute ended up in the courts.

Brad Carver, the Atlanta lawyer who helped draw up the memorandum, said in an e-mail Friday that many particulars for moving the water were unknown. "Our focus right now is getting the border re-surveyed and asserting our historic riparian rights in the Tennessee River," he said.

Ben Brandon, chief executive of Dade County, Ga., whose northern boundary would be moved to the middle of the Tennessee River if Georgia gets its way, said the scheme has been in the works for some time.

Brandon said he began pushing for access to the Tennessee about three years ago when he realized that tapping the river for its water could become a big public works project. The Atlanta engineering firm of Brown and Caldwell has been advising the county on water issues since 2005.

The authors of the document released Friday assert Atlanta's water needs are not excessive, and that interbasin transfers — taking water from one basin and moving it to another — are not unusual, having been done by other major American cities including New York, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and Houston.

Some environmentalists, though, denounce the practice.

"This project has the potential to do incredible environmental damage and economic damage, because you don't know what the effect is downstream," said Joe Cook, who studies interbasin transfers for the Coosa River Basin Initiative.

Brandon said that Tennessee's resistance to taking the issue more seriously is a bad strategy. "Rather than trying to stonewall, they need to sit down with us and work this out ... because it's not going to go away."