This aggression makes world far more dangerous
OveR the weekend the tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowers reached a level not seen since the early 1980s. on Saturday, President Trump told an election rally in nevada that Russia was cheating on the 1987 arms control treaty which banned land-based cruise missiles in europe.
The treaty had been agreed back in 1987 between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev – leaders who trusted each other enough to take a decisive step in ending the arms race which had been a key feature of the cold war for the previous four decades.
now Trump, in response to Putin’s cheating, is saying he will pull out of the treaty altogether. And the world is back to the hair-trigger situation faced before detente introduced arms control between east and west.
The fact is that the new highlymobile missiles which Russia has developed undoubtedly make the world a more dangerous place. And Donald Trump’s aggressive chestbeating response risks making an already fraught situation worse.
To understand why, we have to look at how Putin has broken his treaty obligations.
The intermediate-range nuclear Forces (inF) treaty banned Russia from having any land-based intermediate nuclear missiles with a range of more than 300 miles. Sealaunched missiles were allowed however – the theory being that they were more difficult for Russia to hide because the submarines and warships from which they were launched could be tracked by the west.
As a result, instead of the lumbering land-based SS20 missiles which worried the west so much in the 1980s, Russia has concentrated over the decades on developing much smaller missiles that can be launched from the sea. Such missiles, albeit without nuclear warheads, were used to devastating effect against rebels in Aleppo in Syria.
what Putin’s technicians have now done is to adapt these Kalibr sea-launched systems to make land-based cruise missiles capable of being transported by small trucks. They can be moved across country at 50mph and it would be impossible to track every one of them – making a surprise attack technically possible.
And the missiles, which fly under the radar, have been fitted with supersonic boosters which makes them practically impossible to intercept. This puts huge numbers of nato countries, including Britain, theoretically in the firing line.
Why this is so disturbing is that it fits into Putin’s tactical strategy. Today’s Kremlin boss is ruthless, but worse he runs a Russia much less moribund than the wheezing communist colossus of the 1980s. Putin’s armed forces are much leaner and meaner than in those days.
war in the 21st century has been practised already from Syria to Ukraine and in cyberspace. Putin knows he doesn’t need two million badly-trained soldiers to be sacrificed in the trenches.
if it comes to war, he’ll need the best cyber-sabotage, the most effective special forces and, crucially, unstoppable medium-range nuclear missiles. which he now seems to have obtained, despite the treaty.
This is why Trump has reacted so vigorously. Playing the tough guy also plays well to his core supporters, and he faces mid-term elections in two weeks’ time.
The trouble is that dropping the intermediate-range nuclear Forces treaty (inF) now might actually suit Russia better in the coming years than the US. while for America, the inF treaty has been a useful bulwark against nuclear escalation, Putin’s strategists have chafed at the restrictions inF imposed on them.
By ripping it up, Trump will be criticised by european leaders – Germany was the first US ally to do so, with foreign minister heiko Maas urging washington to consider the consequences both for europe and for future disarmament efforts.
All of this will delight Putin because it plays into his divide-andrule approach to europe.
More worryingly, if Trump does dump the inF agreement, there will be nothing to stop Putin’s generals from building and refining as many of these new faster-thansound land-based nuclear missiles as possible.
other nuclear powers, especially china and probably india and Pakistan, will want to buy them if they can’t build their own.
This technology is so easy to hide, swift to deploy and difficult to stop that it steeply increases the chances of a successful surprise nuclear attack. worse still, without the trust between the US and Russian leaders that existed in Reagan and Gorbachev’s day, diplomacy is on a hair trigger – as in the worst days of the cold war.
President Trump has declared he wants to make America safer but my fear is that he has made the world an even more dangerous place.