Vlad the PutinLast month Russia said it will no longer comply with the terms of the Conventional Forces in Europe treaty and hinted it could also abandon another nuclear arms-limitation treaty.

Now comes news that Russia has test-fired an inter-continental ballistic missile with MIRV (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicle) capabilities in what President Vladmir Putin (photo at right) says is a response to US plans to "stuff Eastern Europe with new weapons".

Do these developments portend a new arms race between Russia and the United States?  Military experts think not.

Duncan Lennox, the editor of "Jane's Strategic Weapons Systems," says an arms race is not realistic.

"I think this is just a continuation of the process that has been in place for many years between the Russian Federation and the United States," Lennox says.

“Independent Moscow-based military analyst” Pavel Felgenhauer also thinks Russia is too weak economically and demographically to assemble a credible challenge to US military superiority.

Russia takes a rather different view.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said in Potsdam, Germany, on May 30 that the planned U.S. missile-defense system is a threat to his country, adding that "the arms race is starting again," Russian and international media reported.

Russian media explicitly claimed that mass production and deployment of the RS-24 ICBM could give Russia “strategic parity” with the US in less than a decade.

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