Russia has always looked for a “Strong leader”.

Whether tzar, seceratary of communist party or a social nationalist like Putin (just neatly sidestep Godwin there…).

The doubts of constitutionalists like Gorbachov, and drunken narcissists like Yeltsin, do not appeal to the Russian character.

My house guests returned to their Baltic state yesterday. The Soviets were very keen to make sure everyone’s ethnic origins were indelibly recorded, should some group or other ever need a holiday in Siberia, or putting into a mass grave in some forest, so my guests can recite their ethnic backgrounds.

One has family still in rural Russia, and the description of Russian villages with just dirt tracks between them, and people walking or taking a horse and cart in the rare times they venture away from the home village, could have come from Tolstoy.

I’m not sure whether some of the reason why they are still like that is strategic – giving an invader as slow an advance and retreat as Napoleon got in 1812, or just because there was never any need to seek the rural population’s approval with things like paved roads.

Both friends are ardent anti communists! and both totally distrust Putin.

Getting back to the START tangent.

China is now too far down the road to development to risk starting a nuke exchange with anyone. Russia, well, it might be a seriously backwards place for many of its people, but the stone age would still be a big comedown for them.

For the Norks, not so much.

The one that would worry me is Pakistan, falling to the wahabis.

Any group who be persuaded to believe emphatically in the “will of G-d” and who can conscience setting up a mortar or a rocket launch in the grounds of a school or hospital, based on the idea that for them to do so must be G-ds will, and that if kids or patients die, it is not the result of their actions, but of G-d’s will, and if pictures of the resulting casualties upset the west, then that too is G-d’s will…

We once understood their thinking, and knew how to deal with them when they caused trouble (The old method as described by Churchill was by punitive expeditions to burn crops and villages, kill livestock and throw the carcasses down the wells).

What route to take to get a nuclear armed Smaug broken to the leash and made to crawl wearing it in public?