TRUMP’S NEW MISSILE CRISIS

US to quit arms pact over claim that Putin has built new nukes

PULLING out of a historic US-Russia arms treaty endangers life on Earth, Mikhail Gorbachev warned Donald Trump yesterday.

The former Soviet leader said Mr Trump was showing a ‘lack of wisdom’ and risked undermining nuclear disarmament efforts.

The US President wants to quit the pact which bans medium-range nuclear missiles because Moscow has violated it ‘for many years’.

But 87-year-old Mr Gorbachev, who signed the agreement with former president Ronald Reagan at the White House in 1987, said: ‘Do they really not understand in Washington what this could lead to?

He added: ‘Is it really so hard to understand that dropping these agreements... shows a lack of wisdom? Getting rid of the treaty is a mistake. All the agreements aimed at nuclear disarmament and limitation of nuclear arms must be preserved to save life on Earth.’

Mr Gorbachev, who played a major role in ending the Cold War, warned that Mr Trump’s move would ‘undermine all the efforts put in by the Soviet leadership and by the US itself to reach nuclear disarmament’.

The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty prohibits the United States and Russia from possessing, producing or test-flying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles. Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in Russia’s upper house of parliament, said that a US withdrawal from the treaty would mean ‘mankind is facing full chaos in the nuclear weapons sphere’.

In London, Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson insisted he stood ‘absolutely resolute’ with the US. He blamed Russia for endangering the pact and called on the Kremlin to ‘get its house in order’.

‘Our close and long-term ally of course is the United States and we will be absolutely resolute with the United States in hammering home a clear message that Russia needs to respect the treaty obligation that it signed,’ Mr Williamson said.

‘We of course want to see this treaty continue to stand but it does require two parties to be committed to it and at the moment you have one party that is ignoring it.’

Mr Trump said on Saturday: ‘We’ve honoured the agreement, but Russia has not ... so we’re going to terminate the agreement.’ He did not provide details on the violations. The INF treaty eliminated a whole category of nuclear weapons from the US and Russian arsenals.

But in 2012 the US accused Russia of violating the treaty with a range of weapons, including the SSC-8 cruise missile test-launched as early as 2008. Russia has in turn accused the US of violating the treaty with its missile defences.

Russian analyst Dmitry Oreshkin said: ‘We are slowly slipping back to the situation of Cold War as it was at the end of the Soviet Union ... but now it could be worse because Putin belongs to a generation that

‘Slowly slipping back to Cold War’

had no war under its belt.’ Steven Pifer, a former uS ambassador to ukraine, said: ‘Once the united States withdraws from the treaty, there is no reason for Russia to even pretend it is observing the limits.

‘Moscow will be free to deploy the 9M729 cruise missile [Russia’s name for the SSC-8], and an intermediate-range ballistic missile if it wants, without any restraint.’

Republican senator Rand Paul said it was ‘a big, big mistake to flippantly get out of this historic agreement’, adding that he wanted a ‘rational discussion’ between Moscow and Washington to settle their differences.

But another Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, backed the President, saying pulling out was ‘absolutely the right move’ because ‘the Russians have been cheating’.

The German government said it ‘regrets the planned withdrawal’ and it will require discussion among nato countries, calling the treaty ‘an important element of arms control’.