Can't rest on your laurels now, not when you've got none.

I had no idea how many missle silos we (the U.S.) has.

Montana

Wyoming-Nebraska-Colorado

How many dot Russia and the former Soviet Union? Do any of them still have missiles?

Just makes you think a bit.

While this blog has been dormant for some time, we still live in interesting times, which has spurred me (Konstantin) to revive this blog. Look at what we have below:

CFE Treaty can be modified after all signatories ratify its adapted version - Lavrov Interfax Russia, Russia

Heightened tension as Russia drops arms treaty
Euronews.net, France

Russia Moves Toward Treaty Suspension
The Guardian, UK

Russia parliament votes to suspend arms treaty
Canada.com, Canada

Russia bolsters its political, economic, and military strength in the world, while nostalgia for Soviet rule resurges. National Public Radio [USA] had a lengthy story on the air this morning , "The Good Old Days?," about many Russians now see the time of Communist rule as having been better times.

I will try to get a русский друг моих — a Russian friend of mine — to write something about this. The point of this blog was not to be simply linking to international news stories about the resurgent Russia, but to have multiple people writing about it, and eventually, readers commenting about it. The challenges will be to get it going, and keep it going.

До свидания,
K.

BBC: Russia suspends arms control pact

Oh boy.

Thanks almost entirely to the far-sighted international vision of George W. Bush, Russia has withdrawl from a key Cold War treaty and committed itself to another arms race. Russia has informed the U.S. that it intends to pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Well, Georgie didn't want to feel bound by the ABM Treaty either. Can you really blame Vladimir Vladimirovich for wanting to find a way out?

While Russia has "not fully withdrawn" from the treaty, for all intents and purposes it has done just that. According to the BBC, Russian withdrawal "means that Russia will no longer permit inspections or exchange data on its [weapon] deployments," and has laid out a "six-month timetable for withdrawal and opening the way for the creation of an anti-missile defense system."

Let the new race begin.

"Stalin Planned Army of Ape-Man Super-Warriors"

Here's one from the Old Cold War files. A story originally running in The Scotsman claimed that Uncle Joe wanted to breed a race of hybrid ape-humans to employ in battle. As we know, Russia and the Soviet Union were on the bruising ends of two global wars in the twentieth century, a big reason for mirroring Kaiser Wilhelm II's strategy of conquering eastern Europe and making it regime-friendly satellite states. The ape-man warriors might have made a fine replacement for the millions of conscripted soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars, assuming you could successfully demobilize them after combat, something Wilhelm had a little trouble doing after the Great War. And of course nothing bad came of that...

But I digress. This article is almost two years old. Can anyone vouch for the authenticity of the claims? I will ask our resident Muscovite when he returns from Moscow. In the meantime, here are the links to the MosNews and the original from The Scotsman.

C. Rice: There is no new Cold War

Depending on how much weight you put in what the Bush Administration says, it appears that we've been rejected even before we got off to a start. While in Moscow for talks with her counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected the notion that the tensions between the two nations are anything like what they were during the Cold War. We agree. The two superpowers are no longer threatening to kill each other over deep ideological matters. But the new missile defense tensions are something different from the many systems that were proposed and tested during the Cold War. The last of them, the Strategic Defense Initiative, would have been based on a massive network of orbiting satellites with laser beans. While still in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, it was a different game from what proposal of having the new system based in Poland and the Czech Republic. The laser beams would be in space, not on the ground. Either way, it never went forward despite billions of dollars being spent on research for it.

Although the Arms Control Association hailed the November 2006 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Democrats as a "coup de grace" to Bush's desire to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, Bush's crew still still talking about it and working on it. His talk of withdrawing from the treaty was one thing which sparked an interest in this blog. And we should know by now, does the fact that two of the world's most powerful governments saying there's no new Cold War mean there's not one?

Certainly not. As I've said for some time, this one's going to be even bigger and better than the last one. Even Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is evening dressing up for it!

We are not the only ones who think there's more to it than Ms. Rice or Mr. Lavrov would like to give credit for. Andrei Illarionov, former aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told a Russian radio station that a keynote speech Putin delivered on 10 May 2006 to Russia’s Federal Assembly "shows that Russia has chosen a course towards militarization and sends out a clear signal to restore Soviet-era values and prepare for confrontation with the West." [Link.]

The New Cold War -- NOW With More Nuclear Weapons!

What interesting times we live in.


The President of the United States wants to put a missile defense system in Eastern Europe.

Sure, says Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.

Just don't mind while we add counter-defensive systems and make new ICBMs the missile defense system can't hit.

But there's much more to this than Bush's hegemonic dreams. There's more than Putin's new Russian ICBMs. But they're all part of the big new game. The New Cold War, which is going to be even bigger and even better than the last one!

Many people have seen the writing on the wall for a while. Despite Bush looking into Putin's eyes, or his hoped-for missile reduction (just don't mind the tactical nukes, eh?), Putin has been flexing Russia's newfound strength, which has primarily come from oil. (Ech, oil. Couldn't Russia be a biodiesel production powerhouse? Couldn't we kick up an old-fashioned American Midwest-Ukrainian breadbasket rivalry? "We can make more biodiesel than you with our good ol' American soybeans!" "Nyet, biodiesel production has increased by 125% in the past quarter alone!")

There's the former Soviet republics. There's Chechnya, the connection of some Chechen terrorists to Al-Qaeda. We love democracy, but don't mind too much when they kill the right sort of bad people in the name of protecting oil democracy. Oil is a big part of it. The whole issue of trying to build pipelines around Chechnya, or what Brezhnev was trying to accomplish by invading Afghanistan.

Of course, since the U.S. helped get the Soviets out of Afghanistan, there's been peace in the region. Just like how things are hunky-dory in previous Cold War proxy states Iran and Iraq. We did everything right. Nothing bad came of it. Right?

Part of what we'll do here is explore just what happened there, at least what we think happened. By and large, most people don't know about any of this, how Iran and Iraq were proxies in the Cold War, who the U.S. paid to fire rockets at Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. (That one tall guy with the beard... what was his name? Bush was so hot to get him for a while. Oh well. The important thing to remember is that we got Saddam Hussein, and Iraq has been a shopper's paradise ever since.)

So then. We'll be exploring the ever-evolving U.S.-Russian relationship, nuclear treaties and armaments, leaders of countries involved in both The Old Cold War and the New One. We'll delve deep into Russian geography of all sorts (political, social, ethnic, etcetera).

I can't do it all myself. Want to help write? I'm looking for people who can write coherently, are interested in Russia/the New Cold War/The Old Cold War — there's so many topics that it would be foolish to try and condense them into a short list. Please send a note if you would like to help. Posts will be occasional, at least for now. But things are getting too darn interesting to let this go without writing about any longer.