US to exit nuclear treaty

> Trump claims Russia violated 1987 agreement

WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump confirmed on Saturday that the US plans to leave a Cold War-era nuclear weapons treaty with Russia, which criticised the move as Washington’s latest effort to be the sole global superpower.

Trump claims Russia has long violated the three-decade-old Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, known as the INF, which was signed in 1987 by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

But a Russian foreign ministry source told the RIA Novosti news agency that Washington’s “main motive is a dream of a unipolar world”, one that won’t be realised.

“We’re the ones who have stayed in the agreement and we’ve honoured the agreement, but Russia has not unfortunately honoured the agreement, so we’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” Trump said in Elko, Nevada.

“Russia has violated the agreement. They’ve been violating it for many years.

“I don’t know why president (Barack) Obama didn’t negotiate or pull out.

“And we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons (while) we’re not allowed to.”

Trump spoke as his national security adviser John Bolton ( pix) was set to meet next week with Russia’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, ahead of what is expected to be a second summit between Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.

The Trump administration has complained of Moscow’s deployment of 9M729 missiles, which Washington says can travel more than 500km, and thus violate the INF treaty.

The treaty, which banned missiles that could travel 310 miles to 3,400 miles, put a term to a crisis that began in the 1980s with the deployment of Soviet SS-20 nucleartipped, intermediate-range ballistic missiles targeting Western capitals.

The Russian foreign ministry source accused Washington of implementing policy “towards dismantling the nuclear deal”.

Washington “has approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step by step destroying the basis for the agreement,” the official said, quoted by Russia’s three main news agencies.

“This decision is part of the US policy course to withdraw from those international legal agreements that place equal responsibilities on it and its partners and make vulnerable its concept of its own ‘exceptionalism’,” the official said.

Russian senator Alexei Pushkov wrote on Twitter that the move was “the second powerful blow against the whole system of strategic stability in the world” with the first being Washington’s 2001 withdrawal from the Anti- Ballistic Missile treaty”.

“And again the initiator of the dissolution of the agreement is the US,” he wrote.

Bolton himself pressured Trump to leave the INF and has blocked any negotiations to extend the New Start treaty on strategic missiles set to expire in 2021, according to The Guardian newspaper. – AFP