Is a new arms race afoot?

its wasnt just the Japanese that were monsters around that time, but thats a bit off topic.

i think the more that the russian people taste the bits of freedom that they are slowly getting and the more westernised the country becomes the less likely they are to try stuff like this, but just becuase the try to build them to do actually build them doesnt mean they will get used, or that that is even the reason as to why they are doing it. Maybe its just for some good old national pride, the government is so corupt my biggest worry is also who they would sell it too!!

The Cold War never stopped. Maybe what happened with the break-up of the Soviet Union was a strategic retreat. The idea that it stopped is a lie we were sold. We were lulled into thinking it was over and gave up on our efforts to expose and counter the communist block's threat and actions.

We began to fund their efforts by funding portions of their nuclear industry in an effort to reduce its vulnerability to compromise. This allowed them to focus the funding they have on other sectors of their military/industrial capability.

Who remains in positions of leadership throughout the system in both countries? The senior leaders may have changed in the case for Yeltzen, but Gorby was KGB and Putin was KGB. Both were hand picked and proteges of Yuri Andropov.

Gorbachev owed his political advancement to his vigorous performance in office and also to personal connections. In addition to Kulakov, Gorbachev enjoyed the confidence of Mikhail Suslov, who served as senior secretary for ideology of the CPSU, and of Yuri Andropov, the chairman of the KGB (Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, or State Security Committee). Suslov had served as first secretary of the Stavropol’ Territory committee of the CPSU in the 1940s; Andropov was a native of the area and often vacationed there.


Gorbachev - MSN Encarta
In November 1978, shortly after Kulakov’s death, Gorbachev moved to Moscow to succeed Kulakov as Central Committee secretary responsible for Soviet agriculture. In 1979 he also became a candidate (nonvoting) member of the CPSU’s Politburo, its top policy-making body. In October 1980, at the age of 49, Gorbachev was made a full member of the Politburo, thus becoming the youngest member of the Communist Party’s inner circle.


Vladimir Putin Biography (Political Figure/President of Russia) — Infoplease.com
As the hand-picked successor of Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin was elected president of the Russian Federation in 2000. After earning a law degree in 1975, Putin joined the KGB, the security force of the former Soviet Union. He spent years working primarily in East Germany, then left the service in 1991 and became active in the politics of St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad). He was brought to Moscow by Yeltsin in 1996 and served as an administrator in the Kremlin and an official for the security organizations which replaced the KGB. In 1999 Putin became Yeltsin's fifth prime minister in 17 months, then became acting president when Yeltsin left office. He was officially elected to the office in 2000 and then re-elected in a landslide vote in March of 2004.

Yuri Andropov - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Andropov returned to Moscow to head the Department for Liaison with Communist and Workers' Parties in Socialist Countries (1957–1967). In 1961, he was elected full member of the CPSU Central Committee and was promoted to the Secretariat of the CPSU Central Committee in 1962. In 1967, he was relieved of his work in the Central Committee apparatus and appointed head of the KGB on recommendation of Mikhail Suslov and subsequently brought into the Politburo as a candidate member; perhaps, for his activity in supporting of the regime of political stagnation [1] and his brutality in repression of dissidents [2].

In 1973, Andropov was promoted to full member of the Politburo. He was the longest-serving KGB chairman and did not resign as head of the KGB until May 1982, when he was again promoted to the Secretariat to succeed Suslov as secretary responsible for ideological affairs.

Two days after Brezhnev's death, on (November 12, 1982), Andropov was elected General Secretary of the CPSU being the first former head of the KGB to become General Secretary. His appointment was received in the West with apprehension, in view of his roles in the KGB and in Hungary.

RDT&E efforts take decades and cannot be stopped and started. The fact that Russia now has a maneuverable hypersonic missile (unveiled last year or the year before) should be an indication that they never stopped their cold war activities.

The fact that China was working on plasma cloaking as a stealth technology for their version of the SU-29 and systematically acquired and exported critical US military industrial manufacturing capability over the last decade or two should show their effort is ongoing and never stopped with the "end of the cold war."

Only bacause we completed our program and became operational first. Japan had a program aided by Nazi Germany. Germany's program was a sideline as PBS says, because the Germans believed their Blitzkrieg would cause the war to be too short for the program to produce operational capability prior to the end of the war.

China will someday be a major, major problem. The Chinese might be the next great people, in terms of world dominance. I hope not.

How many countries can field a 100,000,000 man army?

The only consolation might be that historically, the Chinese have never wanted to venture too far beyond their borders. They'll fight like hell to protect their borders, but they've never been that interested in the world beyond. Organizing life in China itself has always been a sufficient challenge to warrant full-time attention. Keep your fighers crossed this trend holds up in the future.

i doubt that very much, i think they will more likely own most of the world in a few years rather then have to declare any sort of war against it, in 50 years they will be making most things, therefore they will own the power, the government has already shown they can effect the world economy just by 'adjusting' their own. its only going to get worse.

But, internal order will always remain an issue for them. The more economic success they enjoy, the more their population will demand political freedom. They could succumb to revolution and other forms of internal chaos, as a consequence of economic prosperity. Just a thought. Whatever it takes, we need to sabotage them.

haha yeah i know, maybe if we all make sure we buy chinese products only.....:dunno:

I beg to differ, they might tecnically be as you say, but only because they incorporate lands to their own. Just as a curiosity: the largest naval fleet ever to set sail was chinese.

Yes, under a Chinese naval commander, whose name I can't recall off-hand, who was ordered to not sail too far from home. It was a conscious decision of the part of his chain-of-command, which extended to the Emperor, to not explore the world, even though the Chinese had a huge fleet capable of circumnavigating the globe at that precise moment. Think about it -- with their massive army, the Chinese could have conquered all of Indo-China, Siberia, India and surrounding nations, the Philippines, much of the rest of the South Pacific, and could even threaten Australia and New Zealand. But.....they haven't. They didn't even counter-attack U.N. forces in 1951 until they approached the Chinese border with North Korea. In 1979, when China attacked North Vietnam to punish it for screwing around on its border, it kicked arse, and then promptly withdrew. The Chinese are reclusive. They always have been. That might change, however.