The Button by William J. Perry

Author:William J. Perry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950665181
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2020-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

But now, all of this is at risk. In “Arms Race Two: The Sequel,” we have the US and Russian presidents conspiring in the opposite direction—to kill nuclear arms control.

Under President Putin, it became an open secret that Russia was chafing at the INF Treaty’s limits. Russia lives in a dangerous neighborhood with intermediate-range missiles all around, particularly in China, which is not bound by INF. Moscow wanted out but did not want to withdraw openly and get the international blame for killing the agreement. Pressure began to mount with US deployment of missile interceptors in eastern Europe under President Obama. Regrettably, Moscow secretly developed, tested, and then deployed “multiple battalions” of up to a hundred land-based cruise missiles (with the catchy name of SSC-8 or 9M729) that are prohibited by INF.6

The Obama administration saw this coming in 2014 and wisely chose to stay inside INF and work with the Russians to get them back into compliance. This effort did not succeed by the end of the administration, but at least Obama did not withdraw and thereby give Russia an excuse to openly break from the treaty and build many hundreds of new weapons.

President Trump, however, fell right into Russia’s trap. Rather than seek to keep Russia inside INF and thereby at least partially constrained, President Trump handed Putin a free pass to get out of the deal—and have Washington take the blame. Russia is now free to build as many land-based intermediate-range missiles as it wants. This is the worst possible outcome.

Think of it like highway speed limits. The limit is 65, and Russia is speeding at 75. If we throw away the speed limit, Russia can now go 125 with no constraints. How is that better?

Meanwhile, in addition to the new weapons under development to replace the nuclear “triad,” the Trump administration is fielding new, “more usable” nuclear warheads for use on strategic submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) and is developing a new fleet of sea-launched Tomahawk cruise missiles (SLCMs). And now that the Trump administration is no longer bound by INF, it has started testing a new ground-launched cruise missile and ballistic missile, formerly prohibited by the treaty.7

Russia sees these new INF-range missiles as a significant threat, particularly because they have very short flight times from western Europe to Moscow and provide almost no warning of attack. “This is a very serious danger to us,” Putin said on February 20, 2019. “In this case, we will be forced, and I want to stress this, we will be forced to envisage tit-for-tat and asymmetric measures.” He added that Russia would not only target the launch site of any Europe-based missiles, but—referring to the United States—would target the command center from which they are launched.8

Of course, Russia already targets the United States with nuclear weapons, and the United States targets Russia. This is nothing new. What Putin was saying to Americans is that nuclear war will not stay “over there.”

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