Whiskey: Did I mention Putin’s scheme to have Russians move out of cities to villages? Spread out? Where they are relatively invulnerable to nukes (unlike highly urbanized America, Europe, Japan, and China)? Russia can well live in a nuclear proliferated world is Putin’s gamble, that’s why he is pushing it along. America, mostly can’t.

You don’t remain an industrialized power by trying that Great Leap Forward crap. When everyone is playing “Duck & Cover” by moving out to the country at the behest of a central planning authority, no one is making money. But if anything, Russia has always been MORE vulnerable to nukes because all their eggs are in the Metropolitan Moscow basket. In America the government is “of the people, by the people”, so it can be reconstituted anywhere even if Washington DC is taken out.