Ukraina valde Ryssland före EU - stora protester som följd, länkar i inlägg2

NATO members have also taken a series of relatively modest military steps to reassure its East European members. The United States has sent six F-15 fighters to Lithuania to bolster NATO’s air policing mission in the Baltic states and has sent 12 F-16s to Poland, which borders Ukraine.

Two NATO surveillance planes are patrolling Polish and Romanian airspace. Britain also recently announced that it planned to send several Typhoon aircraft to join the Baltic mission.

The North Atlantic Alliance isn’t likely to do anything direct or meaningful about Putin’s fait accompli, but the wheels are already turning within defense ministries and military think tanks about what indirect steps might be taken to deter further adventurism by Moscow. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out where this debate will end up in Washington: the delicate balance of terror — the nuclear balance — is back on the table as an active concern. Why? Because the White House was already reorienting (no pun intended) America’s military posture to East Asia, where both of our prospective adversaries possess atomic weapons, and now the world’s other nuclear superpower, Russia, has muscled its way back into U.S. military calculations.

As chance would have it, this strategic shift occurs at precisely the moment when modernization of the U.S. nuclear arsenal has become a major issue among military planners. Washington hasn’t done much to renew its deterrent since the Cold War ended a quarter-century ago. Plans to build 132 stealthy B-2 bombers capable of chasing down Russian mobile launchers in a nuclear war were pared to a mere 20 planes when the Berlin Wall fell, the number of ballistic-missile submarines has been reduced, and so has the number of Minuteman III ballistic missiles sitting in silos across the upper Midwest. The Obama Administration has not built a single new nuclear warhead since it entered office, and has retired more warheads than China has in its entire arsenal.

The U.S. can’t stay on this vector indefinitely without seeing its deterrent whither, because most of the nuclear bombers were built during the Kennedy Administration, the subs are due to start retiring around 2027, and the Minuteman missiles aren’t certified for operation beyond 2030. And then there’s the fact that tritium, the hydrogen isotope that boosts fission reactions to thermonuclear scale, has a radioactive half-life of only a dozen years (unlike plutonium, which pretty much lasts forever). The Pentagon has plans for developing new subs and bombers before the current arsenal has to be retired, but funding is problematic — particularly with spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.