The American public, in particular, was furious. All this time, money, and lives wasted in the Middle East while the Russians secretly pursued their plans to crush the free world? Russia had thousands of fully realized nuclear warheads that it could deliver to any place on earth. It made bin Laden and al Qaeda look like petty criminals. How had all the smart people missed that one? And when the American public was upset, it let people in power know it.

The incumbent president, who was running for reelection, saw his poll position go from first to fifth as his opponents successfully painted him as soft on Russia. Every major magazine had Konstantin’s picture on it. Every pundit show from Hardball to Face the Nation to Meet the Press and every blog, chat room, and cybercafé talked about nothing else other than the rise of Russia, the possibility of a return to the cold war, even the reemergence of a new Iron Curtain that some insensitive souls were already dubbing the Titanium Coffin.

The political talk show pundits were screaming the loudest from their billion-watt stages, claiming that they’d been voicing this potential danger all along when of course they’d been laser-fixed on the Middle East like everyone else. Still, they collectively roared, “I speak for the common man when I say, nuke the damn Reds before they nuke us. It’s the only way.”

The major television networks trotted out their enormous archives of grainy black-and-white images of nuclear bomb detonations. At least two generations of Americans for the first time saw pictures of wide-eyed 1960-s-era schoolchildren huddled under desks as though a bit of laminated wood and flimsy glass could actually protect them from a thermonuclear blast. Along with this came film footage of the communists parading their military might in front of the Kremlin. And it scared the hell out of everybody.