Mammoth Hot Springs image courtesy of Brocken Inaglory under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license

Russian President Vladimir Putin told senior Russian officials that long-range conventional high- precision weapons could provide an alternative to nuclear deterrence. Long-range conventional weapons give Russia a conventional means of striking discrete targets quickly anywhere in the world. But conventional ballistic missiles could carry the same danger of escalation as nuclear weapons, since they are difficult to distinguish from nuclear weapons once they have been launched. …