Vladimir Putin threatens US arms race with new missiles announcement

This is what one should expect from MAD. The US should not be able to make a first strike without threat of an effective counter-response.

As people have been pointing out since at least the SDI efforts in the 1980s, it is far easier to develop systems to evade antiballistic missile defenses than to build such defenses.

Remember too that the US is spending some $1 trillion to develop and deploy super-fuze. Quoting https://fas.org/blogs/security/2017/03/super-fuze/ "Under the cover of an otherwise legitimate life-extension of the W76 warhead, the Navy has quietly added a new super-fuze to the warhead that dramatically increases the ability of the Navy to destroy hard targets in Russia and other adversaries. ... the new super-fuze increasingly will be seen as a front-line, first-strike weapon that is likely to further fuel trigger-happy, worst-case planning in other nuclear-armed states."

See also https://freethoughtblogs.com/stderr/2018/02/08/the-new-york-... . "The Russians are developing new weapons to provide them a second-strike capability, and are (reasonably enough) designing them so that they would not be useful in a counter-force strike. It is actually an attempt to ratchet down the situation, slightly."