Europe Will Become a Battlefield: Putin Bluntly Explains What Discarding the INF Treaty Means

ER Editor: We also highly recommend this piece by Finian Cunningham titled America’s Nuclear Death Wish – Europe Must Rebel. Cunningham explains why the placement of these missiles on European soil would constitute such a threat to Russia:

Trump announced last this week that the US was finally pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, a move confirmed by Bolton on a follow-up trip to Moscow. That treaty was signed in 1987 by former President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was a landmark achievement of cooperation and trust between the nuclear superpowers. Both sides removed short and medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe.

When the INF Treaty was implemented three decades ago, the US and Russian nuclear arsenals were seriously dialed back to the strategic level of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) confined on respective landmasses separated by thousands of kilometers. As Igor Korotchenko, editor-in-chief of Natsionalnaya Oborona, told Russia’s Vesti news channel, the ICBMs typically have a flight time of 30 minutes from launch. That time gap would give Russian defense systems time to respond effectively to an incoming strike from the US, and vice versa.

But, as Korotchenko noted, the impending installation of intermediate-range missiles by the Americans in European states will reduce the flight time of a possible US nuclear strike on Russia to a couple of minutes, even seconds. That would seriously challenge Russian anti-missile defenses, as well as greatly increasing the margin of error in detecting a strike, possibly leading to mistaken escalation. In other words, the strategic balance has been thrown into disarray by the US over the INF, just as it was again thrown into disarray back in 2002 when Bush trashed the ABM.

It also presents the Americans with the temptation to exercise their “first-strike doctrine”...

Trump is to meet Putin in Paris on November 11. We’ll see what ultimately transpires.

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Europe Will Become a Battlefield: Putin Bluntly Explains What Discarding INF Treaty Means

INFORMATION CLEARINGHOUSE

President Putin: “We are concerned that the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty was terminated. Now we are talking about the treaty on intermediate-range and short-range missiles.”

Original article

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