Anti-War – by Jason DitzIn new comments on the BBC, British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond claimed “worrying signs” about Russia’s military activity in Eastern Europe, and claimed Russian President Putin was considering new military invasions in the region.
Hammond then expressed openness to the idea of the Pentagon scrapping a decades-old arms treaty with Russia and deploying a number of nuclear weapons on British soil, saying he needed to see a more detailed case before making a decision, but that it was worth considering.
He went on to say that deploying nuclear weapons in Britain could be a way to “send a clear signal to Russia that we will not allow them to transgress our red lines,” though he did say he wouldn’t support “unnecessary provocations,” which apparently he did not feel the nuclear weapons would be.
The US has claimed Russia to be in violation of the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaty because of a cruise missile test launch, and Congress has been pushing for the US to withdraw from the treaty and start putting withdrawn nuclear arms back into Western Europe.
This seems an extreme overreaction, given the tensions with Russia center on the long-Russian Crimean Peninsula being reannexed after its secession from Ukraine, but many US hawks seem to believe their own hype about the Russian annexation being the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Europe, and are once again gearing up for a world-ending nuclear exchange.
“This seems an extreme overreaction,…”
Granted.
But by whose standards?