The question is no longer whether America needs a national missiledefense, but how and when America will end its vulnerability toballistic missile attack.
The Cold War provided the US with strategic and defensive advantages; some politicians also used it to push their view of what it meant to be American.
MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russian President Vladimir Putin is to miss the funeral of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, denying the man who failed to prevent the collapse of the Soviet empire the full state honours granted to Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev, idolised in the West for allowing eastern Europe to escape Soviet communist control but unloved at home for the chaos that his "perestroika" reforms unleashed, will be buried on Saturday after a public ceremony in Moscow's Hall of Columns. The grand hall, within sight of the Kremlin, hosted the funerals of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev.