Cold War nuclear treaty killed by China.
A LOT HAS CHANGED SINCE INTERMEDIATE RANGE NUCLEAR FORCES PACT SIGNED
Rest in peace Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Agreement! This week the United States announced that it is giving six months notice of withdrawal from the agreement signed in 1987 by United States President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Virtually a day later, Russia announced that it too was withdrawing from the agreement. Thus a stalwart of the Cold War’s wind up is about to disappear and according to some analysts, Russia and the United States are about to embark on another arms race.
The agreement came about after a little over a decade of sabre rattling and showdown diplomacy between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. over the deployment of cruise missiles and short range ballistic missiles, which were largely a threat to Western Europe. It all began in March 1976 when the Soviets deployed the SS-20 intermediate range ballistic missile in its European satellite states which could carry three nuclear warheads up to 5,000 kilometres. The American response was to deploy its own ballistic and cruise missiles which made its European allies very unhappy.
Of course they wanted the American warheads stationed on their soil as a deterrent, but their overall aim was to cool things in Europe generally by eliminating the intermediate threat entirely.
In the easing of Cold War tensions in the era after Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the agreement was one of the strongest indicators that the Cold War was winding down because both sides, in effect, removed their intermediate range warheads from continental Europe.
But that was long ago; a different time, a different level of technological know-how and a different power alignment. Today the U.S. says that Russia has cheated on the treaty many times by developing an improved and extended range missile that it says has a greater range than the treaty allows. The U.S. has complained to Russia about this missile as far back as the Obama administration but has not received a satisfactory explanation. The Russian answer is basically “prove it,” which is highly unlikely given the tensions, sanctions, and other actions dividing the two nations including the invasion of Crimea, Russian support for Syria’s murderous regime, and now Russian backing for current Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro.
But how much does the United States really want the treaty to continue? When the agreement was reached 32 years ago, China was just beginning the process of military modernization that has now reached a torrid pace. Then, for example, most of the Chinese air force flew dated Soviet aircraft or Chinese-made copies of same. China counted on an overwhelming preponderance of manpower to defend itself on land and maintained a small and obsolete fleet limited almost entirely to the waters of the East and South China Seas.
And China now? Building stealth fighters with high-speed and high-altitude capability, a large fleet with at least four aircraft carriers planned (two built and a third under construction) and a growing fleet of intercontinental jet bombers. And China has missiles — from short-range area denial missiles to ICBMS. Would it not also be developing, or already in possession of, the type of warheads that the Intermediate Range nuclear agreement has banned? This is what the U.S. worries about.
China is not a signatory to the 1987 treaty. However the U.S.S.R. (now Russia) and the U.S. may have put on their own straitjackets 32 years ago, it certainly doesn’t suit either nation to stay within the agreement today. Russia is trying, despite a struggling economy, sanctions and a limited ability to build an armed force the size or quality of that of the old U.S.S.R., to match the Americans and the Chinese. The Chinese are seeking hegemony over all of southeast Asia and the United States wants to ensure that any new missiles — cruise or ballistic — it develops will out do the Chinese, let alone the Russians.
This will not start an arms race; one has been going on for 10 years at least. It will not bankrupt the United States but it could put Putin in the same position Soviet leaders were in in the 1980s when the Afghanistan war and their own arms budget broke the back of the old Soviet Union and brought an end to that Cold War.
IT CERTAINLY DOESN’T SUIT EITHER NATION TO STAY WITHIN THE AGREEMENT.
National Post David J. Bercuson is a fellow of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute and director of the Centre for Military, Security and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary.