Key nuclear arms treaty 'dead' as Nato warns of threat from Russia

[Boats]

Key nuclear arms treaty 'dead' as Nato warns of threat from Russia
By: Dan Sabbagh - The Guardian - 8-2-19
RE: https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ruise-missiles

US pulls out of cold war-era INF treaty after Moscow’s ‘secret deployment’ of cruise missiles!!

Nato’s general secretary, Jens Stoltenberg, said Russian 9M729 missiles could reach European cities ‘within minutes’.

A key international nuclear disarmament treaty has formally collapsed amid mutual recriminations between the west and Russia, and with Nato pledging to boost Europe’s military defences.

The alliance’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, said Nato countries were facing a threat from previously banned Russian land-based cruise missiles that could “reach EU cities, with only minutes of warning time”.

The 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, banned all surface-to-surface missiles with a range of between 500km and 5,500km, effectively removing them from Europe.

But the treaty lapsed on Friday after Donald Trump’s administration accused Russia of developing a land-based nuclear-capable cruise missile that the US and its Nato allies say violates the INF range restrictions.

Stoltenberg said the Russian missiles – the 9M729, or by its Nato designation the SSC-8 – were “mobile capable and hard to detect”. As well as being able to strike within Europe, they “lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons in armed conflict”.

In response, Russia’s foreign ministry said the deal had been terminated “at the initiative of the US”. Sergei Ryabkov, the deputy foreign minister, urged the US to implement a moratorium on missile deployments.

Stoltenberg said the moratorium proposal was “not a credible offer” because Russia has deployed the disputed missiles for several years, while a string of alliance members joined the Nato leader in blaming Russia.

Dominic Raab, the UK foreign secretary, tweeted: “Russia has caused the INF treaty to collapse by secretly developing and deploying a treaty-violating missile system which can target Europe’s capitals. Their contempt for the rules-based international system threatens European security. UK fully supports Nato’s response”.

Poland’s foreign minister also tweeted that Russian actions “gave [the US] no choice”.

Russia, however said that trust between itself and the west over nuclear disarmament was low. “The more Nato says it has no intentions, plans, the less we believe so,” Ryabkov told the Tass news agency.

Stoltenberg said Nato did “not want a new arms race” with Russia but promised that members would work together to agree a “credible deterrent” to what he argued was a renewed threat.

Few precise details were announced but the Nato head said the alliance would focus on enhancing “intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance; air and missile defences and conventional capabilities”.

Existing nuclear deterrents would have to remain “safe, secure and effective,” Stoltenberg added, although there were no immediate plans to deploy cruise missiles in Europe. Such missiles were once sited at bases such as Greenham Common in the UK.

The US is expected to test ground-launched cruise missiles within weeks, though the House of Representatives, controlled by the Democratic party, is refusing to approve a $96m (£80m) budget for further research and development.

It is not clear that any European country would be willing to allow land-based missiles to be deployed on its soil; one country, Poland, has insisted there would have to be unanimous Nato support for their deployment, which is unlikely.

Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, criticised Trump in a tweet on Friday: “President Trump walking away from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty is yet another destructive decision that makes the world less safe. This reckless act will heighten the threat of a nuclear arms race.”

The Campaign Against Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said it had handed in a letter to Downing Street asking Boris Johnson “to guarantee that it will refuse to host intermediate range missiles if it is asked to do so by the US administration”.

Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, announced Washington’s formal withdrawal in a prepared statement at a regional forum in Bangkok, minutes after Russia pronounced the treaty to be “dead”.

Both sides had signalled their intention to pull out of the treaty for months, trading accusations of breaking the terms of the deal. “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Pompeo said in a statement issued at an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) foreign ministers’ meeting.

The INF deal was seen as one of two key arms deals between Russia and the US – the other being the New Start treaty, which keeps the nuclear arsenals of both countries well below their cold war peak.

That deal expires in 2021 and there appears to be little political will from Moscow or Washington to renew it. China has already rebuffed calls from the US to join the New Start treaty.

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Personal note: It won't be long now folks - the heat in the kitchen and it's getting imbarable. We knew it was coming - just a matter of time and piss poor leadership on all parties and bad actions will soon relate to mushrooms in the sky.

No use hiding no place to go and if you did have a hole in the ground you have to come out sooner or later and the cockroaches will have a field day. What a waste of society if you can even call us that.

Boats

[Boats]

End of Missile Treaty Leaves a Major Vacuum in NATO Defense
By: Steven Erlanger - The New York Times - 8-2-19
RE: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/02/w...to-russia.html

BRUSSELS — NATO repeated its support for the United States’ decision to abandon the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces agreement on Friday and said it would respond in a “measured and responsible way” to a deployment of missiles by Moscow that violated the pact.

“Russia bears sole responsibility for the demise of the treaty,” the alliance said in a statement, repeating accusations that Russia had long been out of compliance by deploying medium-range missiles with both conventional and nuclear capability. Russia denies breaching the pact.

“There are no new NATO missiles in Europe, but there are many, many, many new Russian missiles,” Jens Stoltenberg, the alliance’s secretary-general, said at a news conference. “We don’t want a new arms race, and we have no intention to deploy new land-based nuclear missiles in Europe.”

Washington has for six years accused Russia of developing a new type of missile, the 9M729, also known as the SSC-8, which it says violates the treaty. The missile has a range of about 900 miles, according to NATO, though Moscow says it can travel only about 300 miles.

While blaming Russia, the United States has cited a threat from China, which was not a signatory to the treaty, as another reason for abandoning the pact. A large percentage of Chinese missiles are of intermediate range, and Washington plans to start testing a new class of intermediate-range missiles this summer that are intended to counter China.

But the abandonment of the pact leaves Europe exposed to Russian land-based missiles capable of hitting their targets within minutes — exactly the vulnerability that led to the treaty in the first place, after the United States started deploying Pershing II missiles in Europe in the early 1980s to counter Soviet SS-20s. The American deployments caused huge public protests in Western Europe and explain why NATO’s 29 countries do not want to go through the experience again.

“We must prepare for a world without the I.N.F. Treaty, which will be less stable for all of us,” Mr. Stoltenberg said in July.

With the loss of the treaty, “Europe loses a central pillar of its security,” Christian Mölling and Heinrich Brauss of the German Council on Foreign Relations wrote in a recent paper. “Russia’s threat potential rises due to its intermediate-range missiles,” which “could split NATO into two zones of security and lead Moscow to assume it holds escalation dominance.”

Russia’s new missiles are land-based, mobile, difficult to identify, rapidly employable and armed with conventional or nuclear warheads, and can strike almost any target in most European countries with little to no warning time, Mr. Mölling and Mr. Brauss wrote.

“This potential could therefore considerably restrict NATO’s operational freedom of action in a conflict,” they wrote, and “as a result, NATO’s general ability to defend itself could be seriously compromised.”

How to deter Russia and balance its missile deployments is a problem that NATO has been discussing for months now.

Part of the answer are existing missiles based on ships or fired from airplanes, which were never covered by the I.N.F. treaty. The accord banned land-based missiles that can travel 310 to 3,417 miles and said they were to be destroyed.

At the end of June, Mr. Stoltenberg described “potential NATO measures,” including further military exercises involving intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance and “closer examination” of existing air and missile defenses and conventional capabilities. “We will ensure that our nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure and effective,” he said.

On Friday, the NATO statement said blandly that the alliance had “agreed a balanced, coordinated and defensive package of measures to ensure NATO’s deterrence and defense posture remains credible and effective.”

The issue is expected to be central to NATO’s next summit meeting, scheduled for London in early December. Responses are likely to include an enhancement of missile defenses against ballistic and intermediate-range missiles, though some NATO members, like Germany, may be reluctant to have systems so directly aimed at countering Russia, argues Katarzyna Kubiak, an analyst with the European Leadership Network.

“While NATO’s military-defensive response to the new post-I.N.F. threat is legitimate, it is only a superficial ‘patch and mend’ to a major problem: a growing crisis in the Euro-Atlantic amidst global geopolitical shifts,” she wrote in a briefing paper.

“Military remedies will only put off solving critical issues between NATO and Russia, deferring to a later point,’’ she added, ‘‘and most likely contributing to a costly and potentially dangerous arms buildup in the meantime.”

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Personal note: I can just bet Russia, China and North Korea are dancing in the street.
This will lead to some God awful events in the years ahead. I think mankind has lost its mind. No winner's in a nuclear war.

Boats