Comrades,
This one made p.17 in the papers and rated a brief mention in the back half of some news bulletins for one evening, as it was too true form to see DJ Trump! being flippant with the seething masses of humanity, so it wasn't seen as very newsworthy. The under 40's are just not shitting bricks about The Bomb like they used to.
Having been considered as "unworkable" and a "treaty in name only" for years, the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty [INF] - which effectively bans the use or development of any nuclear missile that travels between 500 and 5,500 kilometres - has now been unceremoniously junked.
All that good work Ronnie and Gorbie did back in '87 to finally settle the peace question in Europe [not counting the Balkans] - gorn...ripped up and tossed out a White House window like so much ticker-tape by some wack job in the Oval Office.
Of course the Ruskies have the full arsenal of INF range missiles, but they say that's perfectly fine because none of them are nuclear armed, but they wouldn't need much tinkering to pop on a multi-pronged atomic warhead capable of lobbing a few megatons about willy-nilly, if required. The Americans say that China has to sign on to the treaty, when Peking has never shown any interest in Intermediate Range Missiles, and are happy enough to claim that they're only in The Bomb caper, because they have to be.
The Yanks have any number of INF toys on the drawing board too - yikes! - there's now even talk of them also developing a nuclear-tipped torpedo, I mean that is just such a great idea; they could blow up Vladivostok before anyone even noticed.
People are saying it's the start of a New Cold War, but a renewed nuclear arms race has been going on for years...Vlad and Barack were very leery of each other, let's face it. Putin didn't have a "pee-pee tape" to play on Obama
Treaty or no treaty, Russia has the entire planet covered with the Devil's Own Death Delivery System - the SR-28 Sarmat Super Heavy - anyway... https://themiracleofdemocracy.blogspot.com/2018/03/comrades-idea-of-them-damned-ruskies.html
If they're well enough resourced - which they are - neither side has any trouble getting their boffins to bang their heads together to come up with all sorts of very freaky missile combinations. MAD needs to be guaranteed on both sides, because there is no such thing as tactical nuclear warfare. They're working on the pretty standard assumption of "never pull a gun on anyone, unless you are going to use it"
Of course the Trumpotus is a little distracted at the minute on the hustings, in a crowd pulling competition with the former POTUS at those last minute campaign rallies in the latest round of barely-contained chaos in the Miracle of Demorcay, known as the US Mid-Terms. DJ! is likely to lose control of the House and then nothing, absolutely nothing, will get done in the USA for the next two years. Congress has been well used to the stupendous cost of funding a nuclear weapons program for nigh on 80 years, so nothing will change there.
As a result, The Donald didn't have the time to break the news that he was planning to pull out of the INF to Old Mate Vlad in person, so, to make sure the electorate knew he wasn't soft on nuclear weapons, DJ! promptly dispatched his leading hawk, Secretary of State Lil' Micky Pompeo, to Moscow.
When Pomps - who's only been in the job five months after almost everything else he's ever touched has turned to shit - showed up in the gilded meeting hall in the Kremlin, Putin button-holed him with a shot of vodka and said "oi, Micky...wuz this I hear? Has your eagle eaten all the olives and left only the arrows behind?" in a clever allusion to the Great Seal of the United States of America. Them damned Ruskies know their insignia.
Outwitted from the off, Lil' Micky reputedly replied "I'll get back to you on on that, but I didn't bring any more olives".
Ike's military/industrial complex is rubbing its hands together in glee with all the shiny new nuclear hardware they're itching to sell for a king's ransom, so, as usual, the best we can do is keep our heads down and scan the horizon for mushroom clouds in the morning.
"Shelter from Atomic Attack in Existing Buildings". US Federal Civil Defence Administration technical manual, 1952
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