United Press International,
WASHINGTON: Is Russia seriously considering putting nuclear pressures on Europe to a degree not seen since the last dark days of the Cold War? Or are a group of Russian generals trying to derail the reformist military policies of President Vladimir Putin and his Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov?
U.S. military analysts are asking these questions after a well placed, senior Russian general Wednesday was reported in a major Moscow newspaper as saying Russia might consider opting out of the 1987 Intermediate-Range and Short-Range Nuclear Forces Nuclear Forces Treaty.
The daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta quoted Gen. Vladimir Vasilenko, the head of the Russian Defense Ministry's Research Institute, as saying that Russia could consider the redeployment of intermediate-range, nuclear-capable missiles that were scrapped under the 1987 treaty.
The historic INF treaty was negotiated and signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, and it removed the dark threat of the mobile, multi-independently targeted vehicle, or MIRV-ed warhead RS-20s, known by NATO as the SS-18 Satan missiles that were deployed against the cities of Western Europe in the late 1970s and the first half of the 1980s.
To counter the threat, NATO deployed its own mobile intermediate-range Pershing II missiles that could destroy the cities of European Russia. The Pershings too were scrapped under the treaty. Today, some SS-18s reworked as civilian Dnepr boosters have even been used to fire U.S. and European communications satellites into orbit from the Russian-run cosmodrome at Baikonur in Kazakhstan. They have proven exceptionally reliable.
U.S. military analysts were taken by surprise by Gen. Vasilenko's comments because they could see no rational reason in Russia's national self interest for them. As we have monitored in many BMD Focus and BMD Watch columns, Russia has been pushing ahead energetically with a highly successful series of tests of its upgraded ground-launched and land-mobile Topol-M intercontinental ballistic missile and its sister Bulava submarine-launched ICBM, both with MIRV warheads. Both missiles are being fitted with ramjets and other maneuvering and evasive equipment to render them immune to the U.S. ballistic missile defense systems now being developed and deployed by the Missile Defense Agency.
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BMD Focus: Russia rattles missile treaty
