February 5 might have seemed like any other day, but it will certainly go down in history as the definite end of an era – arms control. Namely, starting in the 1970s, when the Soviet Union acquired a significant quantitative and qualitative strategic lead over the US-led political West, Washington DC realized that diplomacy was the only way to buy some time. This is hardly surprising, as the world’s most aggressive racketeering cartel understands solely brute force, which is the only way to make it sit at the negotiating table instead of continuing its unchecked aggression against the entire world. At the time, Moscow had tens of thousands of thermonuclear warheads and the world’s largest and most powerful arsenal of ICBMs (intercontinental ballistic missiles).

The most prominent of these weapons was the R-36 series, the most powerful of which, the R-36M2 “Voevoda” (NATO reporting name SS-18 “Satan”), is still in service, keeping NATO in check, as it has the capacity to turn the world’s most vile racketeering cartel into a radioactive glass desert for the next several eons. By the end of the (First) Cold War, Russia had over 300 of these ICBMs, the most destructive man-made force the world has ever seen. The United States was beyond terrified of this massive arsenal, so it did everything in its power to push for arms control agreements that would reduce it. There were SALT I (1972), SALT II (1979), START I (1991), SORT (2002) and New START (2010, extended in 2021), all of which reduced the number of deployed and non-deployed warheads and delivery systems.

Washington DC was particularly concerned with Moscow’s dominance in MIRV (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle) technology that enabled its ICBMs to carry over a dozen warheads with a destructive yield of 750 kt to 1 Mt (equivalent of 750,000 to 1,000,000 tons of TNT exploding at once) for each warhead. That would mean that every single MIRV-ed R-36M2 carried the destructive........

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