Russia Seeks Safety in Nuclear Arms

Russia has been making a lot of noise over the past few months since the school murders, trying to re-establish itself as a world power.
Show casing new missile systems, building subs for India, the Ukrainian election mess.

The way it looks Putin wants to go back to the former Soviet Union days instead of free market, hmmm one to watch.

No more a superpower, its conventional forces greatly weakened, Moscow increasingly relies on the deterrent power of atomic weapons.

December 6, 2004
L.A. Times
By David Holley, Times Staff Writer

MOSCOW � It was near the end of President Vladimir V. Putin's reelection campaign early this year, and two days of high-profile military exercises highlighting his role as Russia's commander in chief had been marred by failed tests of submarine-launched missiles.

But with a few cryptic words, Putin dispelled the gloom. The exercises, he said at a news conference, confirmed that Russia would soon possess intercontinental nuclear weapons capable of maneuvering in flight to evade antimissile defenses.

"No other country in the world has such weapons systems," Putin said. "It means that Russia has been and will remain one of the biggest nuclear missile powers in the world. Some people may like it and some may not, but everyone will have to reckon with it."

The end of the Cold War, improved relations with the U.S. and the personal rapport between Putin and President Bush have all served to make Moscow's military seem far less ominous than in Soviet times. On top of that, Russia's conventional forces have vastly weakened.

The sad state of its regular military has forced Moscow to place fresh emphasis on nuclear weapons in order to protect its interests in Europe and Asia. Washington is building military bases in some former Soviet republics. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has expanded eastward into the former Soviet Baltic republics. Washington has continued to develop missile defenses.

www.latimes.com...

Interesting, thanks for that...

Russia won't remain a world power for much longer. China will take over pretty soon with the USA. Countires like Germany, Italy and Japan aren't allowed to make big armies or weapons tech because of end of WW2 Treaty, so that ruels them out...

Strategic threats are carefully planned threats by predator nations or groups that transcend their own normal sphere of influence and threaten the entire world with conquest and/or control. In this analysis I will discuss three current strategic world powers, which constitute a premeditated threat to world liberty, and the complex tactical maneuvers between them as they position themselves for the coming, inevitable conflict. Two of these world powers are nations--Russia and China--and the third is a transnational conspiracy of power by a combination of individuals in the West attempting to maneuver the world into a New World Order (NWO) of global control, euphemistically masquerading as a "global democracy." I will refer to the latter as Western globalists. All less powerful nations in the world fall under the influence of one of these three powers, either as direct allies, client states for the purchase of arms, and/or diplomatic allies working in collusion to further strategic goals of global hegemony. There is one further complicating factor, however. The Western globalists are divided into two main factions: a US/British faction firmly in control of the financial means of the NWO, and a European faction of hard-core leftists, secretly aligned with Moscow, which controls the majority of votes in the General Assembly of the UN. I will attempt to describe each of the three power centers, their allies, and what I believe their individual strategy involves.

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE:
www.worldaffairsbrief.com...

Putin's become quite the ahole....

While worrying about what other countries should be doing, why doesn't he concentrate on the mess on his own homeland instead of trying strong arm other nations?? Oh wait, communism can't fix the mess at home, so he'll just divert attention away from his country onto other's....

I think Russia has the ability to become a economic super power to rival that of China and the US. They have large numbers of well educated and skilled workers. They also have vast natural resources. Many companies are starting to realize this Ford for example just opened a factory in St. Petersburg.

But many companies are weary to invest large amounts of money in Russia right now because of the horrible red-tape they must go through and other factors like the Mafia control.

Russia is still in a transition period you can't expect the change it was gone through to be easy and quick. I see near unlimited potential in Russia and know it will return to be a super power in a economic sense. The already still have the military power of a super power just from the shear numbers of nuclear and bio weapons they have alone.