The less we have to fear. (For clarity, I obviously am not referring to their nuclear arsenal, which is mostly useless except as a suicide attack.)
It looks like Russia is having to outsource the building of their warships, including their aircraft carriers. Information Dissemination has something up about this.
From a financial point of view, this might make sense. However, from a security point of view, this sounds like the dumbest idea in a long time. What is to keep the builders from building small vulnerabilities that their home country could utilize? This would make Russia's buying from China particularly risky, as the two of them constantly vacillate between being best friends and fiercest rivals, and right now they're more the latter than the former. Moreover, Chinese firms are very susceptible to subtle pressure from the government. However, even buying from (NATO founding member) France would be a bad, bad idea. It would be so easy for the French to share those specs (and vulnerabilities) with any and all NATO countries--in fact, if war broke out, it would probably be mandatory.
Would there be any safeguards against this? Russia could try to go over the ship with a fine comb, or even completely redo the computer systems to prevent back-door access, but I would think something could be done that would not be fixable.
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