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US and Russia face nuclear arms race as both threaten key treaty

By Debora Mackenzie

5 February 2019

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The US says Russia’s 9M729 missile breaks the INF nuclear treaty

ITAR-TASS News Agency/Alamy

A key nuclear arms treaty is facing oblivion, as the US and Russia accuse each other of violating it. Last week, US president Donald Trump announced his attention to leave the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) if Russia does not give up a missile which the US says breaches the agreement. Russia denies that it does.

Under the treaty, the US and Russia are banned from having ground-launched missiles, nuclear or not, that can fly from 500 to 5500 kilometres. The US says Russia’s 9M729 missiles can fly that far, thus breach the treaty, and arms experts agree. Russia denies it, and charges that the US’s Aegis anti-missile launchers could breach the treaty.

The dispute, say experts, could be resolved by inspections and changes to both systems, but neither side wants this, so the treaty will expire in six months.

Intermediate-range missiles are intrinsically destabilising, says Daryl Kimball of the Arms Control Association in Washington DC, because they can hit a target in minutes. Countries fear attack without warning, raising tensions and making escalation in a crisis more likely.

Losing the INF may not mean a rerun of the Cold War, however. Russia initially wants non-nuclear warheads on its missiles, says James Acton of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC. If it invades the Baltic states, for example, these could hit defence forces deep inside Europe without inviting a devastating nuclear counter-attack.

In fact, says Kimball, Russia has deployed 20 to 40 non-nuclear 9M729s within range of Europe since 2017. Without the treaty, the US could reciprocate. Such missiles can take out nuclear command and control centres, says Kimball, so nuclear-armed states might launch their nukes before losing control.

Now only the 2010 New START treaty imposes missile limits, and inspections, on the US and Russia. It expires in 2021 unless the two agree to extend it. If they don’t, the countries with 92 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons will be without agreed limits, and inspections, for the first time since 1972 – and talks have not yet begun.

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