Below The Beltway

According to The New York Times, as much as ten percent of America’s electricity comes from material recovered from old Soviet nuclear weapons:
MOSCOW — What’s powering your home appliances?
For about 10 percent of electricity in the United States, it’s fuel from dismantled nuclear bombs, including Russian ones.
“It’s a great, easy source” of fuel, said Marina [...]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not able to persuade Russia to sign on to sanctions against Iran over it’s nuclear program:
MOSCOW, Oct. 13 — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton held lengthy talks with senior Russian officials Tuesday as part of an intense American effort to improve relations, but she made few gains on [...]

In a story that’s receiving headline treatment from Matt Drudge, Robert Fisk is reporting in The Independent that several oil producing states, along with China, Russia, and France are working on a plan to abandon the dollar:
In the most profound financial change in recent Middle East history, Gulf Arabs are planning – along with China, [...]

Hard to say whether this is a result of the missile defense decision or not, but it’s certainly a positive development:
NEW YORK (AP) — Giving some ground on a top priority of President Barack Obama, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday that sanctions are rarely productive but he opened the door to tougher ones to [...]

After all, when was the last time you heard of something like this happening:
Boris Yeltsin got so drunk during a visit to Washington in 1995 that Secret Service agents found him standing on Pennsylvania Avenue clad only in his underwear and trying to hail a cab so he could fetch a pizza.
That was among the [...]

As the days go one, it’s becoming ever more apparent that the President’s decision to forgo construction of a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic was probably the right one:
Call it another revolt of the generals. More than 13 years ago, the nation’s military leaders told civilian defense officials they wanted [...]

Only days after the United States announced it was scrapping a planned missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, Russia has announced that it is dropping plans to base missiles near Poland:
Russia will scrap a plan to deploy missiles near Poland because the U.S. no longer wants to place a missile-defense system in [...]

Former National Security Adviser Zbignew Brezinski has endorsed the President’s decision to scrap a Eastern European missile defense plan, though he thinks the White House badly mishandled how it was announced:
Is the Obama administration decision to end the missile-defense program the right one?
Well, let me first of all say that my view on this subject [...]

As further evidence for the hypothesis that the Eastern European reaction to President Obama’s decision to forgo development of a planned missile defense system won’t be viewed so badly in Eastern Europe, Steven Taylor points to this article from March revealing that it was support for the system that led to the collapse of the [...]

This sure doesn’t sound to me like they think we’ve abandoned them:
A Polish-speaking reader sends over this early poll from the GfK Polonia Research Institute on Obama’s decision to cancel the missile defense site in Poland.
The result: A plurality think it’s a “good decision for Poland,” while only 31% think it’s a bad decision.
See here:

Rough [...]