The departure of the U.S. from the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia on Friday set off concerns that broader efforts to stem nuclear weapons are now at greater risk of collapsing — especially a separate treaty limiting ballistic missiles on each side that are capable of carrying nuclear warheads tens of thousands of miles.
The official pullout from the INF Treaty comes six months after the Trump administration previewed its intention to scrap the 1987 agreement, citing repeated Russian violations.
The pact, which was negotiated by then-President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, banned all land-based missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
It has long been considered a landmark achievement in arms control by outlawing an entire class of weapons and significantly reducing military tensions between East and West — particularly in Europe, where Soviet and NATO missiles could quickly threaten population centers on both sides and deprive leaders adequate decision time in a crisis.
“This was a treaty that helped end the Cold War,” said Jon Wolfsthal, a former arms control official in the Obama administration. “It worked well for 30 years and then Russia was caught cheating.”
Russia began developing the banned missiles as long as a decade ago, according to the U.S. government, a charge Moscow has denied.
“The United States worked hard to prevent this outcome,” the chairmen of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jim Risch (R-Idaho), said in a joint statement. “For nearly six years, the United States pursued dialogue with Russia in the hopes it might return to compliance. It did so under both Democratic and Republican administrations. And it did so in concert with our allies.
“But as has often been the case under Vladimir Putin, Russia responded with denials, obfuscation and false counter-accusations,” they added. “President Trump made the right decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty.”
Another factor in the decision to pull out of the INF Treaty was the military rise of China, which is not governed by the treaty and can freely develop such missiles.
That’s “the reason the U.S. put no serious effort into preserving the treaty,” said Thomas Countryman, a former State Department arms control official who believes more should have been done to try to salvage it.
Other critics say forces in the Trump administration, especially national security adviser John Bolton, were too quick to abandon the treaty.
“There are some voices in the U.S. government that believe that because China is not limited and has these intermediate-range missiles, the U.S. needs to have them, too,” Wolfsthal said. “That’s not a consensus and it’s not clear that such missiles are needed militarily, but between John Bolton and those voices, it was enough for Donald Trump to kill the treaty,”
It’s unclear what exactly the U.S. and its NATO allies will do now that there is little hope the Russians will return to compliance.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg recently told POLITICO that “if they don’t come back into compliance, we have made it absolutely clear, we will respond. … We will respond in a measured, defensive way. We will not mirror what Russia is doing. … We don’t have the intention of deploying new nuclear missiles in Europe, but we will respond making sure we have credible deterrence.”
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The departure of the U.S. from a nuclear forces treaty with Russia today set off concerns that broader efforts to stem nukes are now at greater risk of collapsing https://t.co/dGVaujAV6l
— POLITICO (@politico) August 2, 2019
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