Richard Fernandez writes at PJMedia.com that the announcement of “new” Russian weapons should come as no surprise.

Vladimir Putin’s announcement of a new series of strategic weapons including

  1. a missile able to strike the US via the South Pole,
  2. an autonomous underwater vehicle tipped with a hundred megaton warhead to devastate American coastal cities
  3. and a nuclear powered cruise missile capable of all azimuth attack

has raised fears that the Cold War is back. …

… Unnoticed in the storm of press frenzy is the fact that most of Putin’s wonder weapons have been in development for some time. As Jeffrey Lewis of Foreign Policy points out: “all of these Russian systems predated Trump and his Nuclear Posture Review. In fact, all of these systems were known to the Barack Obama administration — even the cruise missile, which I now realize in retrospect some U.S. officials had been hinting at for some time.” …

… The announcement of these wunderwaffe plus the revelation that “all of these systems were known to the Barack Obama administration — even the cruise missile” makes it harder to understand why president Obama publicly mocked then presidential candidate Mitt Romney for suggesting that Russia was a threat; or blithely allow Russia to muscle itself into Syria; or stand by and allow the Russian election hacking to proceed unchallenged when all along he knew, or must have known.