[Aerich]

Ok, whoa - Stalin did not think he was divinely inspired. He *was* a godless communist after all. However, he DID have an aircraft-carrier-sized belief that he was destined to be remembered as the world's greatest leader. In his own mind, HE was the socialist God and it would have been blasphemy (relatively speaking [img]smile.gif[/img] ) to believe that he was directed or influenced by another being.

As far as I know, Stalin never thought he could be wrong. He disappeared for a week right after Hitler invaded, and that was because he had a nervous breakdown; he did not believe that Hitler would invade. The problem being that Uncle Joe had positioned over 80% of his army within 200 miles of the border, thinking HE would be doing the invading. The standing army was wiped out, and they had to practically make another one from scratch. Stalin had purged 90% of the officer corps in the '30s, including everyone with a smidgeon of common sense and initiative (but somehow missed Zhukov). All he had left were a bunch of frightened yes-men who would not move without his direct order. Kind of inconvenient that he went cuckoo during the key opening stages of the invasion. Another interesting historical fact - "Stalin" translates to "Man of Steel". He had his underlings so cowed that they didn't even come into the room to help him when he had the stroke that killed him. The reason: he did not give them permission to enter. Although I do have a lingering suspicion that maybe they saw their chance to get rid of him...

Re: China - yep, I agree that China is the biggest threat in the sense that it has the largest army and best capability to launch an invasion. I'm just not sure they'd ever do that, although Taiwan is a sore spot for them. They are considerably more integrated into the world economy than they were even 20 years ago, and that is only helping them (albeit sometimes to develop better weapons). While the nuclear possibility is there, I truly believe (possibly because I sincerely want to believe it) that no nation would start a nuke war with the USA. How many thousand warheads do you have? The arsenal of any other country looks miniscule in comparison. I don't think China is enough of a rogue for that - North Korea, now, may be something entirely different.

OK, now I get the 5 almost-catastrophes. The Cuban Missile Crisis plus four technological and communications mistakes made while walking the disaster tightrope. Yikes. I was pretty sure that U2 wasn't very close. It made Eisenhower look like either an idiot or a liar, but it was more calculating than hot-blooded, on Krushchev's part. Well, that's cleared up. One testosterone-fueled incident and four monumental screwups. ::Sigh::