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Since the Columbia accident, the Russian space agency, or the Russian space program, has been literally carrying the load bringing us all the supplies we need on the Progress vehicle, smaller amounts on the Soyuz vehicles.

We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

If it hadn't been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

The fact is that Americans were sent to Russia that have not been returned.

We, being the Western world, wouldn't let Russia off the hook on debt. So there were demands on debt servicing in the early days until they ran out of reserves. There was no real aid program, just a fictional aid program.

Much of the aid we first gave to Russia we took away from what we promised Britain. So in a sense, Britain participated in a very real way in the recovery of Russia.

For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world.

Another adverse factor was the way the Russians received continual reinforcements from their back areas, as they fell back. It seemed to us that as soon as one force was wiped out, the path was blocked by the arrival of a fresh force.

The Cold War went on for so long that it bred a kind of worldwide military establishment. Even when budgets went down in the early and mid-nineties, it didn't really affect it.

It is clear that while our Army was engaged in Afghanistan and Iraq, Russia studied U.S. capabilities and vulnerabilities and embarked on an ambitious and largely successful modernization effort.