Russia secretly deployed nuclear cruise missiles that violate a treaty with the US
Alex Lockie
Business InsiderFebruary 14, 2017
Russia has issued a serious challenge to the US by deploying nuclear-capable cruise missiles that could pose a threat to western Europe, The New York Times reports.
Jeffrey Lewis, the founding publisher of Arms Control Wonk, told Business Insider in an interview that the missiles were likely 9M729s, a ground-based adaptation of Russia's Kalibr missiles that famously debuted by striking targets in Syria, nearly 1,000 miles away, from the Caspian Sea.
The missiles violate the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF, because they have a range of 620 to 3,420 miles and fire from ground-based launchers, enabling Russia to hit European capitals from its homeland.
"We knew it was coming for a long time," Lewis said of the missiles. Russia "started testing in 2008. In 2011, the Obama administration decided it was a compliance problem."
The treaty between the US and Russia represents one of the few successful arms-control achievements in the two superpowers' fraught relationship. In the 1980s, Russia began developing nuclear missiles of an intermediate range that could strike targets in western Europe.
By 2014, President Barack Obama concluded that Russia had violated the INF. Lewis said that last year at an INF special verification meeting, the US confronted Russia with evidence of its violation, to which the Russians responded with "capricious arguments" that the US had also violated the treaty.
"None of the Russian accusations amount to the US, in secret, deploying a large number of missiles that violate the treaty," Lewis said. "The US does not have ground-launched intermediate-range forces anywhere."
Despite the fact that both the US and Russia have intercontinental ballistic missiles that can travel around the world, intermediate-range missiles pose significant and destabilizing risks.
"With ICBMs, you can do things to reduce the range, but they're not optimal," Lewis said. "There's a reason militaries want optimized range."
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http://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-secretly-deployed-nuclear-cruise-192300762.html
