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U.S. political leaders such as Barack Obama might be willing to discuss making a nuclear-weapon-free world a reality, but in Moscow, the tone is decidedly different.

Almost two decades since the end of the Cold War, the United States and Russia still retain stockpiles of about 10,000 nuclear weapons each and have committed only to reduce to about half that number by the end of 2012, when the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty comes into force.

There are now seven other nuclear weapon states, including North Korea, which carried out its first nuclear test on October 9, 2006. Their arsenals range from a few simple warheads to several hundred high-yield thermonuclear weapons.

For the Asia-Pacific region's five powers, it's important for both economic and security reasons that they achieve common ground and work together.

The term "outer space" has always inspired visions of vast regions of nothingness. So even 50 years into the space age, people still tend to view space like the early pioneers viewed the Wild West--sparsely populated, and therefore in little need of laws or regulations, and so boundless that no one worried about ruining the environment.

Among the many reasons for the deterioration in relations between the United States and Russia is the Bush administration's recent announcement of plans to deploy components of a missile defense system in the Czech Republic and Poland. While the administration said the system is designed to target future Iranian missiles, the Russians objected that it would also hold their nuclear missiles at risk. They suggested that the United States use a radar in Azerbaijan, which would be unable to track Russian missiles, in lieu of the proposed facility in the Czech Republic.

The idea that lax accounting, a violation of security procedures, and/or plain negligence could cause a warhead to disappear from a nuclear superpower's arsenal without notice was one of the scariest scenarios in the immediate post-Cold War period. More than a decade later, it turns out these concerns weren't unfounded. Such a scenario more or less occurred at the end of August. The only surprise was where it happened--not in Russia or one of the former Soviet republics as expected, but in the United States.