User blog comment:Solowing106/A second Cold War?/@comment-1715389-20130405055908

I personally believe that there isn't a "new" Cold War, so to speak, but rather that the first one never ended. People forget that by the 1960s, the Cold War was a 3-Way Power Struggle between the United States of America, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the third of these powers: the People's Republic of China (although compared to the Soviets the US considered them a minor threat). Sure, the Soviet Union fell, but that still leaves the US and China, and until one of THEM falls, the Cold War can't end.

Also, just like any conflict, the focus of the Cold War has changed. Now, the arms race isn't over nuclear weaponry: it's over conventional platforms, and primarily seem to revolve around two things:

1) Stealth: the US used to hold a monopoly on this, much like they did with nulcear weapons for a few years.  Now that other countries, from Russia to China to India, are developing stealth aircraft, the whole world is becoming nervous over the possibility of these nations using their aircraft for preemptive strikes, similar to nuclear weaponry only perhaps even more dangerous to military assets because of the precision an advanced aircraft can have when attacking.

2) Drones: this was a technology that had been developed for a very long time in several different countries, starting with World War II (point and case: Project Aphrodite for the US and the Goliath tracked mine for Germany).  The idea of taking a human being out of the line of fire has proven quite the attractive one, but only recently has this technology been applied again to the offensive role.  After the success of the US drones such as the MQ-1 Predator, other nations are scrambling to develop their own.  Some are even going so far as to steal other countries' drones to reverse engineer them (point and case, Iran), since they represent the advent of a new strike force that unlike their predecessors, are completely expendable.