Wow, that’s great news. CNN is running as a breaking news headline that President Putin says that Russia will resume regular long-range flights of its ‘strategic’ bombers. To decode what that means, during the Cold War the US and the USSR both keep a fleet of bombers packed with nuclear weapons in the air at all times. That’s one third of the trident — ballistic missiles in the ground, strategic bombers in the air and nuclear submarines hidden in the vast depths of the sea, together making each sides’ nuclear arsenal impervious to a first strike knock out blow.
That was the theory at least.
If memory serves both sides stopped regular flights of their strategic bomber fleets during the first Bush administration.
Obviously, having them in the air doesn’t mean they’re going to be used. And they can be scrambled at any time. But unlike ‘targeting’ of nuclear missiles, which is I think literally a matter of keying in a few numbers to a computer, not having these jets permanently in the air is more than a symbolic sign of having the finger a bit off the nuclear trigger.
And it raises an important point. Not everything that happens these days is uniquely President Bush’s fault. Vladimir Putin is no great shakes either. And you can debate whether this is more a reaction to the White House’s aggressive push for missile defense shields and military deals with countries on Russia’s border or more part of Putin’s own growing authoritarianism, trying to stoke xenophobia and increased militarism.
What is not debatable however is that there is more going on in the world — more opportunities and more threats — than what happens in the few hundred mile radius around the ancient capital of Baghdad. There is, as we can see, Russia, which still has a few thousand nuclear warheads which could cause some serious headaches. There’s China, a vast economic and potential military power that will bulk larger and larger in our lives over the course of this century. There’s Pakistan, India, half a billion people to our south speaking Spanish and Portuguese. The list goes on and on.
But our whole national dialog, hundreds of billions of dollars and a lot more are going to Iraq. And more generally the fantasy 450 year long-war epic battle with the Islamofascists. We’re close to breaking the US Army and Marine Corps with over-extended deployments. And in hotspots around the world, there’s a vacuum, as the world sort of rushes past us. In many ways this is the greatest danger in Iraq, not that our future as a nation is at stake in staying (as the right would have it) or even that it’s necessarily at stake in leaving but that our engagement with the country has fixed us with a dangerous national myopia which is letting many other problems fester unattended for going on a decade.
