Never before has a dictator with such a cult of personality had such access to these kinds of weapons. Stalin, as brutal and antagonistic to the West as he was, did not have missiles. Even the Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev had only short-range missiles. (It was his move to place them close enough to reach the United States that provoked the Cuban missile crisis.) And Khrushchev, for all his erratic aggressiveness, was definitely constrained by the Supreme Soviet, which in the end removed him from office, in part because of the Cuba escapade.
Mao Tse-tung had a bomb but no missiles. Leonid Brezhnev had long-range missiles, but his was definitely a collective leadership regime, overseen by the largely older, conservative and generally risk-averse Politburo. In North Korea today, Kim Jong Un is certainly a totalitarian leader with a god-like cult of personality, but he has only a handful of ICBMs whose reliability, range and precision are still uncertain. Finally, China is busily developing its long-range delivery vehicles, but its leader, at least for now, is selected — and largely controlled — by the elite. Moreover, he is rigidly limited to two five-year terms.
Since Western democracies have never confronted an aggressive personality-driven autocracy armed with strategic nuclear warheads, a response must be quickly improvised. The obvious first measure should be to commit all necessary resources to building a far more formidable strategic missile defense. This effort is doubly urgent because of a concerted effort on Moscow’s part to modernize its strategic missile forces. Another important move will be to increase the cost of the Putin dictatorship to Russia through sanctions and other policies.
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