7,000 nukes

KRASNOARMEYSK, Russia: At 5:34 p.m. on Wednesday on a military compound northeast of Moscow, three men sat in a room before small metal boxes adorned with red plastic buttons. Each button was connected to a cable that snaked through a hole in the wall to the forest outside.

Upon a command from Sergei Shevchenko, a senior official at the missile technologies directorate of Russia's space agency, the men pushed the buttons. Outside, a short distance away, a roar filled the air. The ground began to shake.

The buttons had ignited the solid fuel in a rocket motor that had been removed from an SS-25 intercontinental ballistic missile.

In a little more than two minutes, the missile component burned itself out, the latest piece of Soviet-era nuclear hardware to be destroyed under an effort funded by American taxpayers and known as Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction.

(U.S. and Russia celebrate 15 years of dismantling Russia's nuclear arsenal - International Herald Tribune)

7,000. Got that? That's how many nuclear warheads it's claimed have been destroyed under that US-Russian project there (all in Russia - not so much about any being destroyed here).

Know what that means, Bunky? All those warheads, around the end of the Cold War, were pointed right at your head. So why do a handful of Saudi terrorists scare you so much?

Get a grip.