"Perhaps he was just having a rough day, but I would never have greeted a guest in my home with the cold surprise that he greeted me with, " Clay says.

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As nuclear arsenals grew, each of the two main sides in the Cold War gained second strike capability, rendering a surprise attack moot.

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The shocking state of large swaths of the existing Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which our late president rightly implemented as a Cold War hedge to ensure rapid military mobilization after a surprise attack or for speedy logistics re-supply in the event of regional civil emergencies.

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Which should come as little surprise to anyone familiar with game theory, a tool used to analyse the cold war's arms race and a favourite, perhaps not coincidentally, of Europe's trade commissioner, Pascal Lamy.

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Gates spent more time responding to the conference's Saturday surprise, Russian President Vladimir Putin blasting the U.S.'s post-Cold War foreign policy as unipolar and dangerous.

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