Tag: INF Treaty

A New Arms Race

Over the Summer Trump decided in his wisdom to pull out of a decades old treaty limiting missiles, the INF Treaty…..and now after the Russia tested a new missile and now the US felt obligated to do the same….

The Pentagon on Thursday flight-tested a missile that had been banned under a treaty that the United States and Russia abandoned last summer, the AP reports. Some US arms control advocates said the test risks an unnecessary arms race with Moscow. The prototype missile was configured to be armed with a non-nuclear warhead. The Pentagon declined to disclose specifics beyond saying thew missile was launched from a “static launch stand” at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and landed in the open ocean. The Defense Department said the ballistic missile flew more than 500 miles. The test comes amid growing uncertainty about the future of arms control. The last remaining treaty limitation on US and Russian nuclear weapons—the New Start treaty of 2010—is scheduled to expire in February 2021. That treaty can be extended for as long as five years without requiring a renegotiation of its main terms. The Trump administration has indicated little interest in doing so.

The Pentagon declined to reveal the maximum range of the missile tested. Last spring, when US officials disclosed the testing plan, they said it would be roughly 1,860 miles to 2,480 miles. That is sufficient to reach potential targets in parts of China from a base on Guam, for example. The Pentagon has made no basing decisions and has suggested that it will take at least a few years before such a missile would be ready for deployment. Under the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty, land-based cruise and ballistic missiles with a range between 310 miles and 3,417 miles were prohibited. The Trump administration chose to abandon the INF treaty, saying that while it had adhered to the treaty’s limitations, Russia had violated it by deploying a noncompliant cruise missile aimed at US allies in Europe. Shortly after exiting the treaty in August, the Pentagon flight-tested an INF-range cruise missile.

Oh crap!

Here we go again!

How much will this cost the American taxpayer?

Arms experts see the danger of this ill-advised policy…..

Arms experts warned of negative global implications after the Pentagon on Thursday test-launched a second missile that would have been banned under a Cold War-era treaty that U.S. President Donald Trump ditched in early August.

Trump ignored concerns about the impacts on global security and formally withdrew from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty after suspending U.S. obligations under the deal in February and giving Russian President Vladimir Putin six months to destroy weapons that the U.S. government and NATO deemed noncompliant with the bilateral agreement. The deal outlawed land-launched missiles with a range of 500–5,500 kilometers or about 310–3,400 miles.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/12/13/arms-expert-warns-reckless-and-unnecessary-escalation-after-pentagon-tests-missile

The drama continues…..

Watch This Blog!

I Read, I Wrote, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

A Coming Nuke Spring?

Trump in his wisdom(?) has left most of the treaties that the US has lived by for decades…..most of the nuclear treaties have been hit the hardest, INF and START….

Kolossal’naya opasnost.” In a recent BBC interview, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev used those two words – “colossal danger” – to sound the alarm of the risk the world faces as tensions rise between Russia and the West. What prompted such strong language to describe the geopolitical standoff? Two more words: nuclear weapons.

Indeed, Gorbachev himself was a key player in unprecedented atomic disarmament a generation ago, signing the landmark 1987 accord with U.S. President Ronald Reagan to reduce arsenals of the then two superpowers with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF Treaty). Over the past year, both the U.S. and Russia announced their withdrawal from the INF.

https://www.worldcrunch.com/world-affairs/disarmament-to-rearmament-the-quiet-return-of-nuclear-risk

I am not looking forward to a f*cked nuke policy…..I lived through all the duck and roll drills, all the fear and speculation of the nuclear holocaust to come…..

But it is 2020 and an election year….so which of the Dem candidates is capable of a nuclear policy?

Will the candidates continue to support the policy that gives the US president unfettered authority to start a nuclear war? Or will they instead lower global risk of war and publicly commit the US to a nuclear No First Use policy?

Fifty-seven years ago last month the world breathed a sigh of relief. Most of that October in 1962 had been spent on the brink of nuclear war. A stare down at a naval blockade, dramatic UN Security Council meetings, a somber Presidential address, a shot down spy plane – and through it all tense backroom negotiations and letters between Kennedy and Kruschev. Ultimately peace prevailed and we backed away from nuclear armageddon. Now the anniversary is remembered as a shining example of Presidential resolve in the face of crisis. However, that’s not the whole story.

President Kennedy’s leadership didn’t end with the removal of missiles. In some ways it was only just beginning. What he knew was that his responsibility went further. He couldn’t just prevent disaster, he needed to address the causes to prevent it from happening in the future. Some steps were taken immediately, the famous “hotline” between the Kremlin and the White House was installed. Kennedy and then Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, continued the correspondence they began in the heat of the moment no longer discussing immediate moves and demands but potential long term routes toward nuclear de-escalation. Ultimately, in June of 1963 President Kennedy publicly outlined his “Strategy for Peace” in a speech at American University. In it he committed to ending US nuclear weapons testing, voiced his support of the global nuclear testing ban, and called for the pursuit of “complete disarmament.” By October of 1963, the US Senate had ratified the Limited Test Ban Treaty and the path seemed set for de-escalation.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/11/05/which-2020-candidates-are-ready-address-threat-nuclear-weapons

As I look at the candidates we have left in the race I cannot see any of them with a solid nuclear policy…..my candidate being antiwar may be the only one I would trust to come up with a good solid proposal…..the rest of the 2020 field is just Neocons in Dem clothing.

I Read, I Know, You Know

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

What Would Happen If The Nukes Came?

As a child of the Cold War we were confronted almost daily with the possibility of nuclear holocaust…even taught in our schools….our movies and TV shows were about the evils of such weapons use…..

An old evil is waiting…..waiting for its time to be unleashed on the world.

Both the US and Russia have walked away from the Cold War nuclear agreement, the INF, and the word is that both nations are already planning to expand their nuclear capabilities.

Not a good idea!

But the attitudes of the 2 leaders is that they must prepare for nuclear retaliation to gain a peace.

This is a silly notion that seems to be gaining popularity within the Trump White House.

Now what would actually happen if the two nations decided to nuke each other?

There is a wealth of opinions on this notion…the SciFi genre is full of the possible outcomes…..but are predictions even close to reality?

The simulations have been run, and it’s official: even today, a nuclear war between the US and Russia would plunge the planet into a nuclear winter, with clouds of soot and smoke covering the planet.

Globally, temperatures would plunge by around 9 Kelvin (9 degrees Celsius or 16 degrees Fahrenheit) on average, due to the lack of sunlight reaching ground level.

The new model matches one of the best existing models we have, published in 2007. Both reports predict a nuclear winter of several years, upwards of a 30 percent global reduction in precipitation over the first few months, and a cloud of smoke enveloping first the Northern Hemisphere, and then the Southern Hemisphere, too.

“Here we repeat the [2007 nuclear war scenario] using an alternative state-of‐the‐art modern climate model run at higher resolution and with a more explicit simulation of stratospheric chemistry and aerosols,” write the researchers in their paper.

“The use of nuclear weapons in this manner by the United States and Russia would have disastrous consequences globally.”

https://www.sciencealert.com/the-best-simulation-we-have-says-the-threat-of-a-nuclear-winter-is-all-too-real

It is an old story that needs to be retold for a younger generation that has little idea what the results of the use of nukes would be…..plus to call out the thoughtless toads in government that have NO idea what they are doing or who they will effect with their nonsense…..

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

“Lego ergo Scribo”

INF–Something Else To Fear

The year was 1987 and a treaty signed between the US and then USSR in essence ended the Cold War,

It is official…the end of the Cold War has ended.

The United States plans to test a new missile in coming weeks that would have been prohibited under a landmark, 32-year-old arms control treaty that the US and Russia ripped up on Friday. Washington and Moscow walked out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed in 1987, raising fears of a new arms race. The US blamed Moscow for the death of the treaty, saying that for years Moscow has been developing and fielding weapons that violate the treaty and threaten the US and its allies, particularly in Europe. “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in a statement released on Friday, per the AP. Russia, meanwhile, pointed a finger at America.

“The denunciation of the INF treaty confirms that the US has embarked on destroying all international agreements that do not suit them for one reason or another,” the Russian Foreign Ministry said in a statement Friday. “This leads to the actual dismantling of the existing arms-control system.” Pompeo said the US first raised its concerns that Russia was violating the treaty in 2013 during the Obama administration. He said the US tried for six years to prod Russia back into compliance. In February, Trump determined that Moscow was in material breach of the treaty, and the US suspended its own obligations under the agreement. That started a six-month clock to get Russia back into compliance—time that ran out on Friday. “As it has for many years, Russia chose to keep its non-compliant missile rather than going back into compliance with its treaty obligations,” Pompeo said. “The United States will not remain party to a treaty that is deliberately violated by Russia.

How absolutely fabulous! (Sarcasm)

With the treaty now officially gone, the Pentagon is acting quick to start testing and developing new intermediate-range nuclear tests, since of course such missiles couldn’t be developed since 1987.

Officials are concerned, however, that in bankrolling nuclear-capable missiles that were up until yesterday illegal to develop, they don’t have enough money set aside, and US officials say that they are concerned House Democrats may resist further funding.

Defense officials were already criticizing Congress for not giving them more money to develop the missiles, saying “it’s going to help Russia” to not spend more money on nuclear-capable arms.

Russia, for their part, issued an offer for the US to join them in announcing a temporary moratorium on deploying any intermediate-range nuclear missiles to try to prevent a race to put a bunch of more nuclear arms into the theater in Europe.

The US is unlikely to agree to such a deal, as the Pentagon seems to have been salivating, from the moment the INF’s collapse was suggested, about the chance to get a bunch of new missiles into testing.

(antiwar,com)

I have said it before and I shall say it again…..”Oh goody we are watching the end of the Cold War end”.

“Ignorantia Interficit Vos Lente”

Be Smart!

Learn Stuff!

“Lego Ergo Scribo”

The INF In The Rear View Mirror

As we slowly remove ourselves from the international treaties of our past….and the newest one is the INF Treaty…..a nuke and missile treaty from the 1980s….

Personally I think it is stupid to pull out yet another nuke treaty……but do not take my word for  it…..

President Donald Trump’s announcement that he intends to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty was cast in contractual logic: the U.S.-Russian agreement prohibits land-based short-and-intermediate-range ballistic and cruise missiles, both nuclear and conventional, which are difficult to track and make unintentional nuclear war more likely. Washington, with support from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, alleges that Moscow has breached that ban, and, as Trump put it , “we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to.”

If Russia has violated the deal, why should America maintain it? While there is a good reason to think National Security Advisor John Bolton would want out of the INF Treaty regardless of Russian compliance—he has argued as much in the past—the basic logic of leaving an already broken treaty seems straightforward. Nevertheless, there are three strategic reasons to proceed with extreme caution.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/skeptics/three-reasons-not-leave-inf-treaty-34287

His, Trump’s, withdrawal should not be the end of arms control as we know it…..

Even before President Trump reversed his position and announced (at a campaign rally for Republican congressional candidates in Nevada, no less) that he was pulling the United States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Agreement (INF), the era of significant nuclear arms control agreements between the United States and Russia was in danger of ending. Such a development must be forestalled at all costs, because arms control efforts have over the last 50 years shown themselves to be remarkably effective.

From the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, which banned nuclear testing in the atmosphere, to the 2011 New START Agreement, which limited the two countries to no more than 1,550 deployed nuclear weapons on no more than 700 deployed delivery vehicles, the two major nuclear powers have concluded dozens of bilateral agreements and supported several multilateral arms pacts.

https://thebulletin.org/2018/10/why-it-could-but-shouldnt-be-the-end-of-the-arms-control-era/

Hopefully Trump  will come to his senses about nukes and arms control…..but truthfully I am not holding my breath….are you?