Armed to the teeth

We are told

When President Barack Obama flies into Moscow today for meetings with Kremlin leadership, at the top of his agenda will be reducing the number of strategic nuclear weapons capable of destroying life on Earth

Such statements should be taken with a pinch or two of SALT, as Rosa Luxemburg, writing during the War to End All Wars, observed:

"All demands for complete or gradual disarmament, for the abolition of secret diplomacy, for the dissolution of the great powers into smaller nationalities and all similar propositions, are absolutely Utopian so long as capitalist class rule remains in power. For capitalism, in its present imperialistic course, to dispense with present-day militarism, with secret diplomacy, with the centralization of many national states, is so impossible that these postulates might more consistently be united into the simple demand 'abolition of capitalist class society'." (The Crisis of German Social Democracy, 1915)