If we could return in time, Vladimir Putin would try to prevent the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. That is what the President of Russia said at a forum in Kaliningrad last week, in response to a question from the public about what historic event in that country he would have wanted to prevent. In 2005, Putin had said in his annual speech on the country’s situation that the Soviet collapse had been “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

At the Kaliningrad forum, Putin announced that Russian scientists had developed novel weapon systems thanks to the achievement of new materials that no other country possesses. “Others have tried, but as far as we know, they haven’t succeeded.”

The Russian leader explained that the unmanned submarine armed with nuclear missiles achieved by his country reaches a combat power 200 times greater than that of other current submarines and is faster than many surface ships.

He also described as “science fiction” the carrier system of intercontinental Avangard missiles that, according to the Russian leader, “flies like a meteorite while the temperature at its surface reaches 2,000 degrees, deviates up and down, right-left and everything works properly”.

Putin reported that Russia has several systems capable of circumventing the U.S. missile shield and can cope with any attack from outside. It brought to light weapons that had hitherto been kept secret, such as a heavy intercontinental missile and a hypersonic cruise missile, submarine drones armed with nuclear rockets and laser weapons.

“Before we had the new weapons systems, no one would listen to us. Listen to us now!”, exclaimed Putin during his fiery speech on the state of the nation before both houses of the Russian Parliament. The leader of the Kremlin said that “for now no one in the world has anything like it” and warned that, by the time they have it, the Russians “will invent something else”.

The rivalry between great powers to develop their armed forces and make them more effective as a strategic interaction mechanism for the elevation of their own military’s morale and the weakening of the adversary’s, began to develop in recent times. Since Washington, foreseeing the end of the Second World War with the defeat of Germany and the triumph of several allies extremely battered by the effects of the war, designed a policy in that direction with the target Russia, which had carried the main burden of the struggle against Nazi Germany, and was in a vast minority among the allied powers. Not only because of the material and economic destruction it suffered after its enormous military effort, but also because of the political and ideological affinity that linked the United States with the rest of the allies.

With the winner practically determined in World War II, and with only a few details to be agreed upon for the unconditional surrender of Japan, the United States exploded atomic bombs on two densely populated cities of the Asian nation with the obvious purpose of showing the world, with that monstrosity, its unique possession of the terrifying nuclear weapon.

From then on, Russia made every effort to achieve parity and the world became bipolar, marked by two major centers of power in Washington and Moscow. The arms race known as the Cold War was born.

Bipolarity changed into a U.S. monopoly with the dissolution of the USSR. Nevertheless, as a single great power, the United States has not been able to evade the paradoxes inherent in capitalism because of its essential ambitions of domination which require wars, inequalities, exploitation and misery to stay ahead of the imperialist pack.

Putin has repeated many times that Russia will not be pushed into an arms race that will deplete its resources as was done to the Soviet Union when U. S. President Ronald Reagan launched the so-called “Star Wars”. But in recent years, Washington’s increased aggressiveness has caused the Kremlin to invest enormous resources in modernizing its nuclear triad: intercontinental missiles, atomic submarines and strategic aviation.

In Syria, by curbing the impunity with which the United States had been acting for a number of years, the Russian Army not only saved Bashar al-Assad’s rule, but demonstrated that “Russia has returned as a military superpower”.

Let’s hope it will be an arms race in which sensible minds are able to counter the serious threat that comes from one of the contenders being led by a maniac. March 5, 2018.

- Manuel E. Yepe http://englishmanuelyepe.wordpress.com/

Translated and edited by Walter Lippmann.