March 8-Your friendly fake-news media is now telling you, in regard to President Putin's annual address to Russia's Federal Assembly just one week ago, that "Oh, we knew about it all along-and anyway, it's not true." But in the unguarded early hours right after that speech, they inadvertently let some of the truth slip out. NPR titled a March 1 wire, "Experts Aghast at Russian Claim of Nuclear-Powered Missile with Unlimited Range." They quoted Edward Geist, a researcher specializing in Russia at the Rand Corporation, "I'm still kind of in shock. My guess is they're not bluffing, that they've flight-tested this thing. But that's incredible." And that's just what EIR has confirmed: that the leading Western scientists and Russian specialists who are paid to know about these things, knew nothing. They were completely in the dark. Now that State of the Nation message of President Putin has many implications, and they're still only just beginning to hit home. First and probably most important, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has stressed-whatever anyone may imagine otherwise, the "unipolar world" fantasy is dead. The 2016 election of Donald Trump was a body-blow to the notion that American "muscle" would dominate the world militarily in behalf of British "brains," but now it is dead forever. And then, ask yourself what our intelligence agencies were doing with their untold billions of dollars, besides tapping everyone's phones? In searching for the Russians under our beds and in our White House, they seem to have missed everything of importance about what real Russians have been doing for up to 15 years. Now move on to some of the most obvious implications for space exploration and, bound up within it, for the future of the world economy. Taken as a whole, the final third of President Putin's speech, the part which laid out new weapons systems (especially its closing sentences), made it clear that humanity is within close reach of a nuclear-powered space plane, which would provide vastly better access to space than rockets, the space shuttle, or anything else available today. The original space plane was the brainchild of the late Austrian scientist Eugen Sänger, whose approach was supported by Lyndon LaRouche and such other experts as the late lamented U.S. "astronaut's astronaut," John Young. But a nuclear-powered space plane, which now comes into prospect, is far superior to the conventional fuel-burning designs of the past and present-until we have a fusion-powered space plane. (It is of interest, though, that China flight-tested a scaled-down version of a conventional space plane on March 2.)