Post-Reagan Worship 80s Revival

Man. You know, when I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, the whole "nuclear specter" of the arms race really scared the living shit out of me. A constant, unwavering, low-level fear that we'd all be vaporized at any given moment. Very chilling memories, waking in the dead of night and such. Anyway, from the Christian Science Monitor.

When the US earmarked billions of dollars for a new national missile defense and broke ground in Alaska, Washington emphasized that it would be "no threat to Russia."

Then, with the inevitability of a cold-war counterpunch, President Vladimir Putin saw fit to reassure Russians that America's shield could be defeated, with a silver bullet successfully tested in February.

"No country in the world as yet has such arms," Putin declared of the new weapon, which amounts to a space cruise missile. It will be "capable of hitting targets continents away with hypersonic speed, high precision, and the ability of wide maneuver."

Welcome back to the future of US-Russian rivalry. Analysts say that a combination of US military efforts - including missile defense, plans for new low-yield nuclear weapons, and expansion up to Russia's western doorstep - are chilling relations with Moscow and spurring a new, higher-tech arms race.

Despite American declarations of goodwill, Russian interpretations of US military shifts are tangled up with a deep history of rivalry, and a current fear of being left behind.

Another consequence of an imperialistic preemptive doctrine, proven now to be as incompetent as it was evil and driven by greed and lust for power.