{"id":120725,"date":"2018-10-22T12:01:39","date_gmt":"2018-10-22T11:01:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=120725"},"modified":"2018-10-29T12:02:53","modified_gmt":"2018-10-29T12:02:53","slug":"trump-says-us-will-withdraw-from-nuclear-arms-treaty-with-russia","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/10\/trump-says-us-will-withdraw-from-nuclear-arms-treaty-with-russia\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Says US Will Withdraw from Nuclear Arms Treaty with Russia"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts warn of \u2018most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s\u2019 as Trump confirms US will leave INF agreement.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Donald Trump in Nevada on Saturday 20 Oct 2018. He said: \u2018We\u2019re going to terminate the agreement and we\u2019re going to pull out.\u2019 Photograph: Jonathan Ernst\/Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

21 Oct 2018 – <\/em>Donald Trump<\/a> has confirmed the US will leave an arms control treaty with Russia dating from the cold war that has kept nuclear missiles out of Europe for three decades.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ll have to develop those weapons,\u201d the president told reporters in Nevada after a rally. \u201cWe\u2019re going to terminate the agreement and we\u2019re going to pull out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump was referring to the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty (INF), which banned ground-launch nuclear missiles with ranges from 500km to 5,500km. Signed by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, it led to nearly 2,700 short- and medium-range missiles being eliminated, and an end to a dangerous standoff between US Pershing and cruise missiles and Soviet SS-20 missiles in Europe<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Guardian reported<\/a> on Friday that Trump\u2019s third national security adviser, John Bolton, a longstanding opponent of arms control treaties, was pushing for US withdrawal. The US says Russia has been violating the INF agreement with the development and deployment of a new cruise missile<\/a>. Under the terms of the treaty, it would take six months for US withdrawal to take effect.<\/p>\n

US hawks have also argued that the INF treaty ties the country\u2019s hands in its strategic rivalry with China in the Pacific, with no response to Chinese medium-range missiles that could threaten US bases, allies and shipping.<\/p>\n

Bolton and the top arms control adviser in the National Security Council (NSC), Tim Morrison, are also opposed to the extension of another major pillar of arms control, the 2010 New Start agreement with Russia, which limited the number of deployed strategic warheads on either side to 1,550. That agreement, signed by Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, then president of Russia<\/a>, is due to expire in 2021.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>
\nMalcolm Chalmers, Royal United Services Institute<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThis is the most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s,\u201d said Malcolm Chalmers, the deputy director general of the Royal United Services Institute. \u201cIf the INF treaty collapses, and with the New Start treaty on strategic arms due to expire in 2021, the world could be left without any limits on the nuclear arsenals of nuclear states for the first time since 1972.\u201d<\/p>\n

Speaking to reporters in Nevada, Trump said: \u201cRussia has violated the agreement. They\u2019ve been violating it for many years and I don\u2019t know why President Obama didn\u2019t negotiate or pull out.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and do weapons and we\u2019re not allowed to. We\u2019re the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we\u2019ve honoured the agreement but Russia has not unfortunately honoured the agreement so we\u2019re going to terminate the agreement, we\u2019re going to pull out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asked to clarify, the president said: \u201cUnless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, \u2018Let\u2019s all of us get smart and let\u2019s none of us develop those weapons,\u2019 but if Russia\u2019s doing it and if China\u2019s doing it and we\u2019re adhering to the agreement, that\u2019s unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with with our military.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, said: \u201cThis is a colossal mistake. Russia gets to violate the treaty and Trump takes the blame.<\/p>\n

\u201cI doubt very much that the US will deploy much that would have been prohibited by the treaty. Russia, though, will go gangbusters.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

John Bolton addresses a press conference following a meeting with his Russian counterpart in Geneva.
Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p><\/div>\n

Russian state news agencies on Saturday cited a foreign ministry source as saying Washington\u2019s move to pull out of the treaty is motivated by a dream of a single global superpower.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No,\u201d a foreign ministry source told Ria Novosti state news agency.<\/p>\n

The official said that Russia has \u201cmany times publicly denounced the US policy course towards dismantling the nuclear deal\u201d.<\/p>\n

Washington \u201chas approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step-by-step destroying the basis for the agreement,\u201d the official said, quoted by Russia\u2019s three main news agencies.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis decision is part of the US policy course to withdraw from those international legal agreements that place equal responsibilities on it and its partners and make vulnerable its concept of its own \u2018exceptionalism\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Russian senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was \u201cthe second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world, with the first being Washington\u2019s 2001 withdrawal from the anti-ballistic missile treaty\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the US,\u201d Pushkov wrote.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon has been generally supportive of the INF treaty but defense secretary James Mattis warned other Nato ministers earlier this month it would no longer be tenable if Russia did not withdraw its Novator ground-based missile, which the US has argued for nearly four years violates the INF range restrictions.<\/p>\n

Nato ministers issued a joint statement saying the INF agreement \u201chas been crucial to Euro-Atlantic security and we remain fully committed to the preservation of this landmark arms control treaty\u201d. But they urged Russia to come clean about the capabilities of its new missile.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis president who is constantly telling us he is deal-maker has failed utterly to save Reagan\u2019s nuclear legacy.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>
\nAlexandra Bell, Centre for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Chinese arsenal has also been a source of concern for the US Pacific Command. Its former commander, Adm Harry Harris, told the Senate in March<\/a>: \u201cWe have no ground-based capability that can threaten China because of, among other things, our rigid adherence, and rightfully so, to the treaty that we sign on to, the INF treaty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lewis disagreed that the INF leaves the US at a significant disadvantage in the Pacific.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe China stuff is nonsense,\u201d he said. \u201cINF does not prohibit sea- and air-based systems, not does it prohibit South Korea and Japan from developing long-range missiles. If China were a real problem, the US and its allies could have acted long ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Alexandra Bell, a former senior state department official and now senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control & Non-Proliferation, said: \u201cWhen problems arise in arms control, you work and fix them.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat shocks me is that this president who is constantly telling us he is deal-maker has failed utterly to save Reagan\u2019s nuclear legacy. He did nothing with his relationship with Putin. There were trades to be made to fix this treaty and he couldn\u2019t pull it off.\u201d<\/p>\n

She added: \u201cWhy would the North Koreans have any reason to believe in any deal made with this president, with Bolton whispering in his ear.\u201d<\/p>\n

_________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Julian Borger is the <\/em>Guardian‘s world affairs editor. He was previously a correspondent in the US, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and the Balkans. His book on the pursuit and capture of the Balkan war criminals,<\/em> The Butcher’s Trail<\/a>, is published by Other Press.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Martin Pengelly is weekend editor for<\/em> Guardian US<\/em>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Agence France-Presse contributed to this report<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 theguardian.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

21 Oct 2018 – Experts warn of \u2018most severe crisis in nuclear arms control since the 1980s\u2019 as Trump confirms US will leave INF agreement. \u201cWe\u2019ll have to develop those weapons,\u201d the president told reporters in Nevada after a rally. \u201cWe\u2019re going to terminate the agreement and we\u2019re going to pull out.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":120727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68,57,65,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-120725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-weapons-of-mass-destruction","category-militarism","category-anglo-america","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120725\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}