The US will withdraw from a landmark nuclear-weapons treaty it signed with the Soviet Union in 1987 as the Cold War ended because Russia has built a cache of missiles and refuses to destroy them, officials said today (Feb. 1).
The start of the withdrawal process, which goes into effect tomorrow, has the backing of the US’s NATO allies and represents the culmination of several years of failed negotiations with Russia. What appears to be Donald Trump’s toughest censure of Russian president Vladimir Putin would allow the US to rebuild a stockpile of intermediate-range weapons, potentially escalating a global arms race.
“For far too long, Russia has violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with impunity, covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad,” Trump said in a statement.
Speaking to reporters, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said today “Russia has jeopardized the United States’ security interests, and we can no longer be restricted by the treaty while Russia shamelessly violates it.”
Critics warned that pulling the US from the deal could result in Putin developing even more weapons, unconstrained. Chris Murphy, the Democratic senator from Connecticut, called the US withdrawal a “gift to Russia,” saying it “allows them to speed ahead with medium-range nuclear weapons without the watchful eye of the US.”
The only winners of this withdrawal will be nuclear weapons’ manufacturers, said several members of Congress in a new bid to limit a new arms race. “Of course the Russians have been cheating on the INF treaty for years; the question is how we punish them for cheating,” said Jim Cooper, a Tennessee Democratic member of Congress.
Reagan and Gorbachev’s new day
Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty in the White House on Dec. 8, 1987. It required both countries to destroy their “ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers,” a range that includes Russia’s European neighbors but doesn’t stretch to the distance between Moscow and Washington, DC, as well as “their launchers and associated support structures and support equipment.”
The treaty “marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons, and utilize extensive on-site inspections for verification,” as Arms Control explains, and in the years afterward, the two countries destroyed more than 2,600 missiles.
Reagan stressed the promise from both countries to actually destroy weapon stockpiles, not just agree not to make more. “For the first time in history, the language of ‘arms control’ was replaced by ‘arms reduction’—in this case, the complete elimination of an entire class of U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles,” he said.
“We can only hope that this history-making agreement will not be an end in itself but the beginning of a working relationship that will enable us to tackle the other urgent issues before us: strategic offensive nuclear weapons, the balance of conventional forces in Europe, the destructive and tragic regional conflicts that beset so many parts of our globe, and respect for the human and natural rights God has granted to all men,” Reagan said.
Russia’s long-term violations
Under Putin, Russia has been violating the treaty for more than a decade, US officials say. In a background call with reporters today, senior Trump administration officials described a pattern of Russia’s violations, deception about its weapons buildup, and the use of lies and propaganda to cloud the situation.
Their tone toward Russia was harsh, a marked contrast with Trump’s past statements on Putin, which included his initial public embrace of Putin’s denial that Moscow meddled in the US election.
In 2004, Russian officials asked if the US would be interested in eliminating the treaty, one official explained, and then again in 2007. He cited a State Department official’s interview with the Denver Post in 2015 as good explanation of the issue. In it, Rose E. Gottemoeller, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said:
Russia tested starting in 2008 a ground-launched cruise missile that flies to ranges banned by the treaty. The banned ranges are are between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. We are quite sure they have tested a capable missile that flies to those ranges, and they tried to get away with it. And we called them on it, starting in May 2013. And we’ve been butting heads ever since.
Earlier this year, in a brazen display, Russia showed a missile-launch canister to journalists in Moscow that the US said openly violated the treaty. “For years they denied they had these missiles,” he said, they tested them on specific dates, and then they “hurled specious insults” at the US when they were questioned about them.
“We made it clear what the Russians need to do” for the US to remain in the treaty, “and the Russians are simply refusing to do that,” one official told reporters.
Turning tough on Putin?
Trump’s presidency has been marked by his refusal to believe his own intelligence community’s finding that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election and by his unmonitored closed-door conversations with Putin. Earlier this week, the US lifted sanctions on companies controlled by Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Putin, and a Trump insider was quickly given a board seat on one of the companies.
Russian officials condemned the US warning in December that Russia should comply immediately or it would pull out of the treaty, calling it “a game made to cover their domestic decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty.”
After Trump and Pompeo’s announcements, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Russia greets the news “with much regret.” Washington has been “unwilling to hold any substantial talks” with Moscow to save the treaty, he said.
NATO “fully” supports the US decision, and Russia “will bear sole responsibility for the end of the treaty,” NATO said in a statement.
A new nuclear-arms race?
The terms of the treaty dictate that it take six months to dissolve, and US officials and NATO expressed hope that Russia would change its behavior between now and then. If it does not, the US will be free to develop short and mid-range missiles weapons of its own, joining China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—and raising fears of an arms race.
US officials called such fears unwarranted. “The short answer is ‘No,'” one said, adding “Let’s be clear if there is an arms race, it is Russia that is starting it.” The US is not developing any nuclear mid-range missiles at the moment, he added. “Nothing the US is currently looking at is nuclear in character, that is just another Russian lie,” he said.
In terms of a new buildup of missiles, “we are some time away from being in a position to know what we might want to deploy, where we might want to deploy it,” he said, and any conversation would be “completely in consultation with our allies.”