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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 2/13/19

One Minute to Midnight

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The next year, U.S. intelligence observed a missile test in Russia that it assessed as a violation of the INF range limitations. Additional tests were observed, which led the Obama administration, in 2014, to report Russia to Congress as being in violation of the INF Treaty. Russia vehemently denied these allegations and demanded that the U.S. provide it with the evidence the allegations were derived from, something the U.S. has refused to do. A series of accusations and counter accusations followed, culminating in the U.S. identifying the offending missile system, the 9M729, and demanding that Russia come into compliance.

There is a solution to be had the INF Treaty provides for the existence of the Special Verification Commission (SVC) for the express purpose of resolving disputes that may arise during the life of the treaty. The SVC has been engaged on this issue, but the refusal of the U.S. to back up its claims of noncompliance with evidence, and the repeated denials by Russia that it has violated the INF Treaty, have made diplomacy difficult. The primary problem, however, isn't the technical aspects of any controversy over treaty compliance as a veteran of several such controversies, I can attest that they can be resolved to mutual satisfaction, provided both parties are committed to the process. The issue today is that the U.S. no longer has in its diplomatic arsenal arms control negotiators of the caliber of Nitze or Glitman. These men have passed, and, as Mizin laments, no effort has been undertaken to groom their successors.

The last serving American expert on arms control, Thomas Countryman, was unceremoniously fired by Trump shortly after he took office. I knew Countryman from when he was the U.S. mission in New York's liaison to the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq. By the time of his firing, Countryman was charged with negotiating, implementing and verifying international arms control agreements. "The world doesn't stop turning just because there is a new U.S. administration," Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, observed in the aftermath of Countryman's firing. "There is an entire global arms regime to maintain. Without U.S. leadership, decisions won't get made or will get taken in ways that harm our national security."

The woman appointed to fill Countryman's role as chief arms negotiator, Andrea Thompson, is a 25-year veteran of the Army who specialized in intelligence but had no arms control background. She came to the White House in 2017 from the McChrystal Group Leadership Institute, an advisory organization formed by retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, for whom Thompson worked in both Iraq and Afghanistan. At the White House, Thompson served as the deputy assistant to the president and national security adviser to the vice president, positions that emphasize political loyalty over subject matter expertise.

During his 2019 State of the Union address, Trump outlined the position he has taken regarding the INF Treaty. "Under my administration," he declared, "we will never apologize for advancing America's interests. For example, decades ago the United States entered into a treaty with Russia in which we agreed to limit and reduce our missile capability. While we followed the agreement to the letter, Russia repeatedly violated its terms. It's been going on for many years. That is why I announced that the United States is officially withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, or INF Treaty. We really have no choice."

There was a choice, meaningful negotiations, but Thompson is no Nitze, and her approach toward arms control negotiations was counterproductive. She met with her Russian counterparts in Geneva in January in a last-ditch effort to save the INF Treaty. "I outlined that to my Russian counterparts on specifically what Russia would need to do in order to return to compliance in a manner the United States could confirm," Thompson said in a press briefing after the meeting. "And at the end of the day, this includes the verifiable destruction of Russia's non compliant missile system."

The Russians, Thompson noted, "paid lip service to transparency. They offered a briefing and demonstration, a static demonstration, of its non compliant missile system. They continued to dodge questions. They continued to push false information regarding the missile's capabilities and the testing activity. For example, a demonstration that Russia can't possibly address the fact that they previously tested the missile, again I reiterate, they previously tested this missile to Treaty-prohibited ranges."

The physical inspection of missiles has always been a part of arms control agreements. The Russians did put the 9M729 missile on display after Thompson's briefing, inviting military attaches to inspect it and its launcher. The U.S. refused to attend and pressured its European allies to likewise boycott the demonstration. A videotape of the event backed up the Russian claim that the 9M729 was little more than an improved version of an INF Treaty-compliant missile, the 9M728, making use of the exact same solid fuel motor. While the static display alone would not be enough to mollify U.S. concerns, it would have been a giant step toward reaching a resolution of the U.S. allegations.

But Thompson wasn't looking for resolution. She was looking for capitulation. "As the undersecretary for arms control and international security and a leader within this administration," she said at her briefing, "for arms control to serve its purpose, violations must have consequences. And as I told Russian counterparts yesterday, Russia faces a choice: It can either have its non compliant missile system, or it can have the INF Treaty. But it cannot have both."

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has declared that Russia tested the 9M729 missile at the range allowed under the INF Treaty, and that the U.S. has provided no proof of the alleged violation. "Only last fall, [the United States] named two dates when, according to their estimates, tests that violated the INF Treaty took place. We explained to them that the tests had indeed taken place, but the range was allowed by the treaty. We asked them to provide some concrete proof of the range violation, such as satellite pictures or something else, but have not received anything," Lavrov said at a news conference.

That the pending demise of the INF Treaty hasn't sent shock waves around the world is, in and of itself, disturbing. The casual reaction on the part of Congress and America's NATO allies to what is, in effect, the end of arms control is alarming. It is one thing for Congress and NATO to accept without question the unsustained contention on the part of both the Obama and Trump administrations about Russian INF Treaty violations, European relations with Moscow have been strained since the 2014 annexation of the Crimea, and Russia-bashing has been in vogue in the U.S. since the intelligence community's allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election were published in January 2017.

But the termination of the INF Treaty is part and parcel of the total unwinding of the last remaining vestiges of U.S.-Russian arms control the New START treaty, which caps the number and type of strategic nuclear weapons delivery systems that can be deployed by both parties. New START expires in 2021, and the unceremonious approach Thompson has taken toward resolving INF Treaty compliance issues has detrimentally affected any chance of an extension to that treaty being negotiated before it expires. "The environment isn't in a place where I can discuss the New START treaty," Thompson said at her INF press conference. For his part, Lavrov observed, "The entire architecture of arms control, including the New START, including the prospects for further nuclear disarmament and the sustainability of the nonproliferation treaty, is in jeopardy."

The Russians have always feared American intermediate-range missiles based in Europe. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was driven in large part by the Russian need to respond to the threat posed by the presence of U.S. Jupiter missiles based in Turkey. And the INF Treaty was signed largely because of Russian concerns over the American Pershing II missile, which could strike Moscow in seven minutes or less after being launched from Germany, eliminating any possibility of Moscow being able to determine whether a notification of missile launch was real or false. Moreover, Russia's nuclear posture launch on detection (meaning Russia would fire its missiles once a nuclear attack had been verified)would need to be altered to "launch on warning" or, worse, "preemptive nuclear attack." The desire to avoid creating the conditions for a nuclear holocaust drove the Soviet Union to sign the INF Treaty in 1987. "The INF treaty was put there in the first place to stop there being a nuclear strike with very little warning time," British security expert Annie Machon has observed. "And that was a step forward at the time that it is being torn up now is very worrying."

The U.S. nuclear posture review published by the Trump administration has postulated specific scenarios in which nuclear weapons could be used including against Russia in Europe. With the INF Treaty gone, and the caps on strategic nuclear weapons soon to be eliminated due to the expected demise of the New START treaty, there is real concern that the U.S. and Russia are about to enter into a nuclear arms race that would rival that of the U.S. and Soviet Union in the 1980s. The difference this time is that neither side has a stable of seasoned arms control experts working on the sidelines to avoid catastrophe. Instead, led by the likes of Andrea Thompson, the U.S. is whistling blithely while sauntering down the path of nuclear destruction.

Thompson would do well to digest the words of Putin during a presentation of the Valdai Discussion Club last October. Confronted with a scenario involving an American nuclear attack, he noted that "the aggressor must know that retribution is inevitable, that it will be destroyed." The Russian president did not mince words when it came to recognizing the consequences of any Russian nuclear retaliation. "We are victims of aggression, as martyrs we will go to heaven," Putin told the audience. "And they will just die."

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is wrong to keep the hands of the Doomsday Clock stuck at two minutes to midnight. The situation is far more grave than its assessed "new abnormal" would suggest. The United States is in the process of creating the conditions for a nuclear war with Russia, and the Russian president is calmly talking about global annihilation if such an event transpires.

The world is on the edge of the nuclear abyss. It's one minute before midnight, and we are acting as if we still have time. We don't.

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Scott Ritter served as a former Marine Corps officer from 1984 until 1991, and as a UN weapons inspector in Iraq from 1991 until 1998. He is the author of several books, including "Iraq Confidential" (Nation Books, 2005) and "Target Iran" (more...)
 

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