The Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from a major nuclear arms treaty with Russia could have serious long-term consequences, potentially reshaping the global nature of the nuclear threat from Europe to Asia.
On Friday, the Administration announced that the U.S. intends to withdraw the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, citing Russia’s violation of covertly developing and fielding a prohibited missile system that “poses a direct threat to our allies and troops abroad.”
“We have raised Russia’s noncompliance with Russian officials, including at the highest levels of government, more than 30 times, yet Russia continues to deny that its missile system is noncompliant and violates the treaty,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Friday. “Russia’s violation puts millions of Europeans and Americans at greater risk. It aims to put the United States at a military disadvantage, and it undercuts the chances of moving our bilateral relationship in a better direction.”
The decision comes after years of arguing between the U.S. and Russia over whether specific weapons programs were in violation, though it received extra scrutiny from critics due to President Donald Trump’s repeated calls for a closer relationship with Russia.
News of the withdrawal has already had an effect. Defense stocks surged on the news, outpacing the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Meanwhile, arms control advocates were left wringing their hands on what the decision meant for the future of nuclear treaties that helped preserve peace since the Cold War.
A more serious realignment will come by this summer.
A post-INF world is now six months away, thanks to a grace period invoked by the treaty’s Article 15, which gives both countries time to reevaluate decisions on whether to walk way for good. When that deadline passes, it will reopen an era when ballistic and cruise missiles can be peppered on either side of the former Iron Curtain with cross-hairs targeting city capitals. A chance for a much larger deployment also now exists in Asia.
The treaty came about during the Cold War, when the United States and Soviet Union would manipulate each other’s nightmares of nuclear annihilation in order to maneuver for advantage in times of relative peace. The superpowers identified certain weapons deemed mutually menacing, and then worked to eliminate the threat altogether.
First signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, the INF treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. It forced the superpowers to scrap more than 2,600 land-based missiles with ranges 310 to 3,420 miles — weapons considered destabilizing to the European continent because of their capability to launch a nuclear strike from anywhere without early warning.
The mutual fear of these weapons — which could be driven on a mobile launcher into a remote area, blasted off and strike their targets in less than six minutes — appears to no longer exist.
On Saturday, the State Department will send a formal diplomatic notice to Moscow of the United States’ intention to withdraw from the INF. It will start the six-month clock ticking, which can be stopped at any time if there’s an opportunity to reverse course. The U.S. wants Russia to destroy the missile, the Novator 9M729, and its launchers. Moscow has denied the missile violates the agreement since May of 2013.
Instead, the Kremlin has insisted that the U.S. is the one that’s in defiance of the agreement, saying certain interceptors on American missile defense systems have offensive capabilities. The U.S. has dismissed Russia’s allegation as false and a red herring.
So if nearly six years of diplomatic talks couldn’t salvage the INF, it’s unlikely that another six months will make a difference.
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