Back to the future: new US-Russia arms race
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"If I wave a plastic gun in front of the police, when they are nervous and they think I'm a terrorist, I'm going to get shot, though the gun has no capability," adds Mr. Postol. "That's the game the Bush administration has been playing, with extremely negative consequences for the US."
Some here quietly welcome those consequences. "Russia is thinking: Should it really oppose [new US weapons], or use them as an excuse to follow the same path?" says Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Center for Defense Information.
For Russia's long-neglected defense industry, the US moves are a potential boon.
"This gives the bombmakers an ... opportunity to revive programs that were actively pursued in the 1980s," says Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent defense analyst in Moscow. He says top Russian officials told him several years ago that plans had already been made "to resume [nuclear] testing, as soon as the Americans give the go ahead ... so that it will be their fault, not ours."
Already, there are signs that Russia reacted offensively to US missile defense plans before they even left the drawing board. Russia launched a 2002 exercise that simulated an attack on Moscow ABM system, which experts say mirrored a strike on a future US system.
"We know from history that people react, nations react, and I would expect Russia to gin up its nuclear weapon R&D programs in response," says David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
Indeed, military historians point to the example of the missile defense system deployed around Moscow in the late 1960s - and the exaggerated American response, which boosted the US nuclear stockpile - as a case in point.
According to a recent detailed analysis in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the CIA in 1967 estimated that Moscow's nonhardened system was "subject to saturation and exhaustion." Still, it was targeted with missiles from Polaris submarines and more than 100 Minuteman ICBMs - some 10 percent of all of the US ICBM force. The result was a "staggering average of eight 1-megaton warheads per interceptor launch site" with a combined force exceeding 7,500 Hiroshima bombs. Such "chilling examples ... fundamentally contradict the portrayal of missile defenses as nonoffensive" concludes the Bulletin.
Such hypersensitivity seemed to disappear in the post-Soviet 1990s, an era of anything-goes US-Russia contacts and joint efforts to safeguard nuclear stockpiles. But there are signs of renewed suspicion.
Russia's secret cities, where much nuclear and other hidden military work took place, are again clamping down. Several military experts have been charged and jailed for allegedly giving away state secrets.
Even military exchanges have chilled. For example, a Harvard program for Russian officers to learn about civilian control of the military notices the change.
"When the Ukrainians and other East Europeans [take part], back home it is considered a leg up on their career path," says Harvard's Goldman, while Russians, these days, are beginning to feel the opposite. "They've been compromised if they come, because they've been consorting with the enemy."
