The White House prepares the return of the Euromissiles
The announcement that "Trump
breaks the historic nuclear treaty with Moscow" - the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) - was no surprise. Now, however, it is official. To
understand the scope of this act, we should review the historical context from
which the INF Treaty was born.
The President of the United States,
Ronald Reagan, and the President of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, signed the INF
in Washington, on Dec. 8, 1987, after having agreed on it the year before at
the Reykjavik summit, Iceland. According to the INF, the United States
undertook to eliminate the "Euromissiles": the Pershing II ballistic
missiles, deployed in Western Germany, and the land-based cruise missiles,
deployed in Britain, Italy, Western Germany, Belgium and Holland. The Soviet
Union committed to eliminating the SS-20 ballistic missiles, deployed on its
territory.
The INF Treaty established not only a
ceiling to the deployment of a specific category of nuclear missiles, but the
elimination of all missiles in that category: By 1991 a total of 2,692 were
eliminated. The limitation of the Treaty was that it eliminated short - and
intermediate-range nuclear missiles launched from land, but not those launched
from sea and air. Nevertheless, the INF Treaty was a first step on the road to
real nuclear disarmament.
This important result was essentially
due to the “disarmament offensive” launched by the Soviet Union of Gorbachev:
On Jan. 15, 1986, the Soviet Union had proposed not only to eliminate Soviet
and U.S. mid-range missiles, but to implement a comprehensive three-stage
programme to ban nuclear weapons by the year 2000. This project remained on
paper because Washington took advantage of the crisis and the disintegration of
the rival superpower to increase its strategic superiority, including its
nuclear superiority. The United States thus remained the only superpower on the
world stage.
It is no coincidence that Washington
only called the INF Treaty into question when the United States saw its
strategic advantage over Russia, China and other powers diminish. In 2014, the
Obama administration accused Russia, without presenting any evidence, of having
experimented with a cruise missile of the category prohibited by the Treaty.
The administration announced that “the United States is considering the
deployment of ground-based missiles in Europe,” that is, the abandonment of the
INF Treaty [1].
The Trump administration subsequently
confirmed this plan: In fiscal year 2018, Congress authorised the financing of
a research and development project for a cruise missile launched from the
ground by a mobile platform on the road.
NATO’s European members support the
plan. At the recent North Atlantic Council meeting held at the level of
Ministers of Defense, Elizabeth Trenta (of the Five-Star Movement) represented
Italy. There Trenta said that “the INF Treaty is in danger because of the actions
of Russia,” which she accused of deploying “a destabilizing missile system,
which poses a serious risk to our security.”
Moscow denies that this missile
system violates the INF Treaty and, in turn, accuses Washington of having
installed in Poland and Romania launch ramps of interceptor missiles (those of
the “shield”), which can be used to launch cruise missiles with nuclear
warheads.
According to reports leaked by the
administration, the United States is preparing to deploy intermediate-range
nuclear missiles launched from the ground not only in Europe against Russia,
but also in the Pacific and Asia against China.
Translation :
John Catalinotto
il
manifesto, October 24, 2018
[1]
“Ritornano i missili a
Comiso?”, di Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italia) , Rete
Voltaire, 10 giugno 2015.
NO WAR NO NATO
Manlio Dinucci
Geographer and geopolitical scientist. His latest books are: Laboratorio di geografia, Zanichelli 2014 ; Diario di viaggio, Zanichelli 2017 ; L’arte della guerra / Annali della strategia Usa/Nato 1990-2016, Zambon 2016, Guerra Nucleare. Il Giorno Prima 2017; Diario di guerra Asterios Editores 2018.
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