If US builds missiles so will we - Putin

This is about intermediate range nukes. Russia has them and has for a long time. The US wants to make some so it has a deterrent below a full blown ICBM.

I never was for sure that we won the Cold War. And I do not recall the Soviets surrendering.

Before I dropped out of my first stint in college to join the Army, I took a course at USF around 1989/1990 called "World Geopolitical Problems" or something along those lines. It had guest speakers. One of them was a former nuclear arms treaty negotiator and I had thought that I would hate that lecture because I expected a left-wing, anti-nuke peacenik. I was completely, utterly 100% wrong about that. From that lecture, I learned that nuclear negotiations back then had a very practical point - reducing Warsaw Pact conventional arms. The Soviets and their puppets were afraid of American nukes and by making really scary systems, the US created bargaining chips that it could use to get the Soviets to do things we wanted them to do - such as agreeing to conventional arms cuts in Eastern Europe. So, that had a point.

Today, however, Russian conventional forces are much smaller than they were in the Cold War, and they don't have the "allies" (puppets) that they had back then. Not sure where nuclear arms negotiations are going nowadays with that changed situation. Since nukes don't require training and maintaining a big conventional standing army, then perhaps the Russians are going to go the nuclear route in their strategy more and more anyway. But if they weren't complying before this, then I don't see how this changes anything. If only one side respects a treaty, was really a treaty?

I think this is exactly why Iran want's nukes: So that it can stir stuff up by Hezbollah-style proxy war, and then hide behind a nuclear deterrent. That's the same thing the Russians will do.