This may come as some surprise to Bruce and Dennis and the "anti-militarization" gang, but it turns out that the Russians have had weapons in space for decades:

In 1976, a Soyuz spacecraft came down in a freezing squall and splashed into a lake; the crew spent the night bobbing in the capsule.

Eleven years before that, two cosmonauts overshot their touchdown site by 2,000 miles and found themselves deep in a forest with hungry wolves. That's when Russian space officials decided to pack a sawed-off shotgun aboard every spacecraft.

Keith Cowing has some interesting documents that describe contingency plans for an emergency Soyuz landing in North America.

[tip: Carl Carlsson]