Critically Timely Alliances

Once it was the Soviet Union and the Western alliance, mostly the United States, facing off against each other. Mutual Assured Deterrence meant that each side maintained an absurd arsenal of nuclear weaponry. Each of which nuclear warhead would be capable of destroying far greater numbers of humans than what the horrified world witnessed in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The numbers of those carefully assembled weapons of mass destruction would be capable of destroying the world many times over.

There is no logic or reasonableness when human aggression is the defining emotion that represents relations between mutually antagonistic countries, just as the same is true between violently disaffected individuals. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union both countries did reach an agreement to reduce the numbers of nuclear warheads each held. And they did embark on this journey of de-weaponization. And then the perhaps-inevitable occurred.

Misunderstandings leading to renewed belligerence and with that the rejection of further weapons reductions. In the interim, other countries of the world that had successfully accessed nuclear weapons had their own agendas. Most of these countries are comprised of populations reflecting the responsible reasonableness of their leaders, and a few represent rogue states whose population has been repressed and disentitled.

It is the larger, looming question of how to respond to states ruled by tyrants whose ambitions are to successfully acquire such weapons of mass destruction and who have no compunction, having done so, in disseminating the ways and means to acquire them to other dictators or terror groups that must be seriously discussed. And that is reason enough for Russia and the United States to settle their differences.

The potential for both countries to arrive at a new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty will be a start. After which they should both invest themselves energetically in forming a larger alliance with countries whose values reflect their own, and to deflect the potential for ownership of such weapons from those countries whose malign intent poses a threat to all of humankind.