Risk of a new arms race after Trump decides to pull out of INF Treaty

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) slams Trump’s decision, which caps a "process that has been going on for several years". Still, the arms control regime saw a real reduction in the number of missiles.

Stockholm (AsiaNews) – The announcement by US President Donald Trump that he intends to pull out the United States out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles Treaty could boost the number of US and Russian nuclear weapons, this according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), an authoritative independent international institute dedicated to research into conflict, armaments, arms control and disarmament.

Trump’s decision last Saturday " confirms what has steadily been unfolding over the past couple of years: the architecture of Russian–US nuclear arms control is crumbling.”

The latter was built on the foundation of the 1972 Treaty on the Limitation of Anti-Ballistic Missile Systems (ABM Treaty). Afterwards, an arms control regime was developed that saw the reduction in the number of nuclear weapons, especially in the 1990s.

Since then, the process however began to slow down, coming to a crawl in the past six years. By early this year, the overall number of nuclear weapons stood at 14 700, far below the all-time high of around 70 000 in the mid-1980s.

SIPRI notes that although the reduction is [. . .] both large and significant”, nuclear weapons are today far more capable that their older versions. What is more, along with the decline in numbers, problems have emerged.

In 2002 the United States unilaterally pulled out of the ABM Treaty, a decision that did not prevent Russia and the United States from signing the Strategic Offensive Reductions (SORT) Treaty that same year, as well as the New START in 2010.

What Trump’s decision does is to bring "a process that has been going on for several years towards its conclusion."

Already in July 2014, the Obama administration had said that Russia had violated the INF Treaty with America’s NATO allies aligning themselves with the US, “albeit somewhat guardedly.”

The charge against Russia is that it has developed a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of over 500 kilometres. Moscow has rejected such a claim, slamming in turn the United States for violating the INF Treaty.

Now Trump has seemingly ended the arguments by withdrawing. Under Art 15 of the treaty, either party can withdraw after giving a sex months’ notice. This means that the INF Treaty can be terminated by April 2019.

Some observers though might see that “the announcement is intended as a manoeuvre to obtain Russian concessions on the alleged missile deployment or on other aspects of an increasingly tense Russian–US relationship. That is what Russian deputy foreign minister, Sergey Ryabkov, implied by calling [Trump’s] move blackmail’.”

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