Washington (CNN)The United States formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia Friday, as the US military prepares to test a new non-nuclear mobile-launched cruise missile developed specifically to challenge Moscow in Europe, according to a senior US defense official.
The US withdrawal puts an end to a landmark arms control pact that has limited the development of ground-based missiles with a range of 500 to 5,500 kilometers and is sparking fears of a new arms race.
“Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement Friday announcing the US’ formal withdrawal from the Cold-War era nuclear treaty.
Pompeo said, “Russia failed to return to full and verified compliance through the destruction of its noncompliant missile system.”
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told CNN’s Hala Gorani that the treaty’s end is a “serious setback.”
‘A bad day’
“The fact that we don’t have the INF Treaty anymore, the fact that the Russians over the years have deployed new missiles, which can reach European cities within minutes, which are hard to detect, are mobile and are nuclear capable, and therefore reduce the threshold of any potential use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict — of course that’s a bad day for all of us who believe in arms control and stability in Europe,” Stoltenberg said.
“At the same time, NATO is there to protect all our allies and we will take the necessary measures to retain credible defense,” he added.
The new US missile test, which CNN reported Thursday, is expected to take place in the next few weeks and will essentially be the Trump administration’s answer to Russia’s years-long non-compliance with the INF treaty, the senior US defense official said.
A senior administration official told reporters that the US will be testing the cruise missiles that were forbidden by the INF treaty because “Russia cannot maintain military advantage,” but claimed that it will take years for the US to deploy those weapons.
Deployment
“We are literally years away before we would be at a point where we would talk about basing of any particular capability. Because of our steadfast adherence to the treaty over 32 years, we are barely, after almost a year, at a point where we are contemplating initial flight tests,” explained the senior administration official, noting that the US would only look at deploying conventional weapons, not nuclear weapons.
But the Pentagon said in March that this ground launched missile could be ready for deployment within 18 months. The administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2020, released in February, included $96 million for continued research and development on INF range missile systems.
And arms control experts say it’s not difficult to convert existing air- or sea-based systems into the ground-based missile the Pentagon plans to test. “It is not a significant engineering task,” said Jon Wolfsthal, director of the Nuclear Crisis Group and a former nuclear expert for the National Security Council under the Obama administration. “It’s well within the capability of major defense contractors and the army to pull off.”
Read the rest here: https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/02/politics/nuclear-treaty-inf-us-withdraws-russia/index.html
WE HAVE GOT TO CREATE WAR!!!!
“WE DONT HAVE ENOUGH PEOPLE”
WE HAVE THE DRAFT!!!!!!!
WE MIGHT LOSE.
“WE OWN RUSSIA AS WELL! WE CANNOT “LOSE”!!!”
“… sparking fears of a new arms race.”
Everybody & their mother is already armed to the teeth.
Their are enough nukes to destroy the entire planet a thousand times over.
As Alfred E. Neuman so succinctly put it… “What, me worry?”
And………the events of WWIII contiue with stakes being raised higher.