Both Instapundit and Outside the Beltway are missing something important about the possibility of Russia being a nanotech leader:  free societies largely depend on the existence of a middle class.  That middle class can be agricultural or urban, service-sectored or industrial… but the deeply impoverished can’t defend themselves from government vampires (or in this case, siloviki, which amounts to the same thing: both are allergic to sunlight), and the upper crust can always cut themselves a deal or remove themselves from a threat.

Large economic benefits from nanotech, while having military repercussions, first and foremost have HUGE civilian production benefits.  So any power that thinks it’s going to use nanotech as a world-stopper, is going to realize that it has inadvertently “lowered the bar” on entry into the middle class… and thus hastened its own demise/transformation.