Why do powerful countries keep huge armies? Because the gun works. After you accept that logic, then a country will do everything it can to secure it's border against invasion. This is why Russia is concerned about NATO expanding to Georgia. The notion that the West will invade Russia may seem crazy right now, but go back 10 years, the idea that USA will invade a Middle East country is almost as crazy.

You have to look at the broad picture : the US is building a missile shield that has the potential to stop MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction), and at the same time Bush is trying to change the 'no first use' nuclear policy. Following that logic, pretty soon the West will have the ability to nuke Russia without fear of reprisal. Then you add the rhetorics from the Western Media and NeoCon about how Russia is EVIL, and McCain's insistence on 'defeating evil'. Russia may be the next target.

In the history of the world, when a leader is convinced that he will win without much cost, he'll resort to a war. The biggest deterrent to war is to convince the other side they cannot win.

Of course. And Hitler has legimiate interests at stake in Czechoslovakia, in Austria, in Poland, in France...

Give me a freaking break...have you learned nothing from the past 100 years? The Russian fear of being cornered is just a pose. They are going to be invaded - by Poland? they are afraid of Georgia? No, they are interested in power, period. And raw Soviet-style power loses out if it has to compete with an open, Westernize system.

I really worry about the people living in the West if folks like you are going to fall all over themselves justifying the corrupt Russian regime's stomping on any local non-despotisms.

For you to cite Saddam Hussien as justification for Russia's position is an example of how pathetic is the typical defense of Russia's action. Besides, at least get your facts right: last I checked, Iraq invaded Kuwait 18 years ago, sparking the Gulf War. Whatever the merits of the invasion of Iraq, Saddam had 18 years warning - it certainly came as no surprise.

Ronin8317:

The notion that the West will invade Russia may seem crazy right now, but go back 10 years, the idea that USA will invade a Middle East country is almost as crazy.

What is this, 1776? Regime change in Iraq became US policy 10 years ago. Before that, there were a lot of people saying the US should have occupied Iraq in 1991. And before that, the Middle Eastern country that the US was supposed to invade was Iran (with whom the US had already traded missiles). Seriously, the idea that the USA would invade a Middle Eastern country has been pretty non-crazy for a generation.

Russia's nuclear deterrent is not threatened by America's ABM system any more than America's nuclear deterrent was threatened by the ABM system that the USSR had protecting Moscow. And the anti-Russia rhetoric is motivated by things like murder, war, and political repression.

I'm not saying that Russia doesn't have any reason to worry about protecting its interests. But the interests it chooses to pursue, and the manner it goes about pursuing them, aren't helping things.

Good points all, Ronin.

Have you considered, however, that the US and the West in general is at odds with those "evil" countries which to some extent are just that, if we will define evil in this context as countries with anti-liberty, anti-individual, anti-human rights ideologies and systems of government?

North Korea isn't on the US' or West's shit list simply because they aren't trading with us, or haven't bowed to American Wonderfulness; it's because it is a brutal, oppressive, murderous regime which controls that country. Do you think if NK decided to embrace something even close to human rights and free self determination among its citizens that the US and the West's posture toward NK wouldn't change accordingly?

The USSR, for instance, wasn't called evil simply because it held idiotic ideas about economics, but because it crushed its citizenry, and every other citizenry it conquered, under its boot.

The US and West were very open, dramatically so, to new and better relations with Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is only as Russia has become dramatically more authoritarian and bellicose itself, that the US has pushed NATO to its doors.

North Korea may be on the shit list, but note that we haven't really put any effort into bringing regime change there. I would venture a guess that this is because there's nothing of value in North Korea. Sure, politicians are going to rattle on about how evil they are, but it's just self-serving bluster.

North Korea also has something like a two million man standing army, missiles pointed at South Korean cities, and now possibly some crude nuclear weapons.

In an even of a nuclear war a complete destruction of human life on the planet Earth is quite assured even if Russia never fired a single nuke. You just cannot win a nuclear war if you happen to be on the same planet as your target.

Charnobyl was just a tiny pop - a collapse of a nuclear reactor and think about the damage it did to the surrounding area and generations of people as far away as Sweden. What would happen after a SINGLE 20 mega-ton (yes, like a thousand Hiroshima bombs) warhead was detonated in Russia? Or in he US?

The causalties would go into tens of millions all over the world. Just from one warhead!

The ABM shield is specifically designed to shoot down a single or maybe two missiles at the best. If anything - it can prevent a nuclear war in the future.

Paxterminus,

A little science behind the nuke thing: Even without running through the math, it is easy to see from this article that the type of plant at Chernobyl contained several tons of Uranium: <link>

Whereas a fusion bomb contains at most a couple hundred pounds of Uranium and or Plutonium. <link>. Although the fallout from the Uranium and Plutonium is more widely broadcast in an explosion, it also has much less long term potency as compared to a reactor meltdown, mainly because a bomb is designed to produce near complete fission in its fissile materials - which leads to a lot of nasty radioactive daughter products - most of which have very short half lives.

In fact many fusion bombs, including the 50 megaton Tsar Bomba (the Russian and world record holder) have been detonated in the atmosphere in isolated regions. In the US fallout related casualties have been closely monitored, and, while every unintentional death from those tests is a tragedy, their total numbers are far far far less than tens of millions.