Clausewitz was Prussian, wasn't he?
"The worst of all conditions in which a belligerent can find himself is to be utterly defenseless."
Now hindsight is a wonderful thing, and seems to be extremely popular in Germany at the moment, but like it or not we're back to butting heads with Russia now. At least this time the majority of the action will take place in the Baltic States and Eastern Europe rather than in the middle of Germany.
Sure, there could have been a period of rapproachment in the 1990s, there should have been and it was a massive missed opportunity. You can hardly blame the Eastern European states for wanting to join NATO though, I mean they would have done anything to get in, because in their mind they were only one wrong step away from another Hungary 1956. Seeing Russian tanks roll up to Pristina airport probably only cemented that opinion. Even now, the Baltic states are convinced that within the decade Russia will attack them. I think that it's highly unlikely such a thing will happen, but the Baltic states have spent the last couple of centuries being kicked around like a football between Sweden, Russia and Germany, one can hardly blame them for being worried.
In regards to the X51a, that's due to enter service...in about a decade, most nations are working on their own hypersonic weaponry. Russia already has a hypersonic ballistic missile system, as does India, and both of them are working on a short range hypersonic cruise missile the BrahMos-II. The Chinese have an interesting design called the WU-14 which is a hypersonic glide vehicle, designed to defeat the current ballistic missile interception systems, meaning that to intercept it we need to turn to railguns and lasers. Warfare is changing, very very quickly and whoever fails to change with it faces becoming obsolete.
In short, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but not particularly useful. Detente with Russia right now would be good, but I don't think it's feasible without essentially telling Eastern Europe 'You're on your own kiddos' which would result in a massive Eastern European arms race.
Lots of misinformation going around, I see a report by the Frankfurter Rundschau claims the upgraded B61 can "be set to explode at various strengths of up to ten-times the devastation inflicted at Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945." which insinuates an upgrade to its explosive power when in fact, the B61 mod 12 has actually had its destructive power dialed back from 400kt to 50kt, but its accuracy increased from 170m to 30m. In fact, the life expansion program of the B61 should hopefully lead to the retirement of the B83 and that's a megaton gravity dropped bomb. In short, the US is reducing the destructive power fo the nuclear weapons but increasing their accuracy.
Does this mean that they're more likely to use a 'bunker buster' nuclear style weapon? Perhaps, I mean we had this concern back with the Bush administration but nothing has yet come of it.
Still, it's unlikely anything will come of it all, we've been punting nuclear bombs around Western Europe since the 1950s and no-one has blown us all to smithereens yet. It's more likely that we'll be nuked by some nutjob with a suitcase full of X-ray machine parts than it is that we'll be nuked by Russia.
