Trump Moves
the World One Step Closer to Nuclear Catastrophe
President
Donald Trump speaks during an election rally in Murphysboro, Illinois, on
October 27, 2018.NICHOLAS KAMM / AFP / GETTY IMAGES
November 4, 2018
In October, President Trump announced he plans to withdraw the United
States from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, carving out a
path to a 21st century US-Russian Cold War. The move demonstrates once again
that ignorance compounded with the need for domination makes for an extremely
dangerous nuclear cocktail of renewed arms racing that endangers human
survival.
While the Russian military may indeed be
in technical
violation of the Treaty by testing a new medium-range cruise
missile, less well known is the fact that a joint commission is currently
exploring whether the US has also violated the Treaty with its own deployment of a missile defense system in
Romania. Of course, the answer to Russia’s cruise-missile testing should not
have been to rip up the famous treaty that ended the Cold War. Rather, it
should have prompted intensifying nuclear disarmament diplomacy.
Former Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev had it
right when he remarked that Trump’s announcement was not the work “of a great mind.”
As Gorbachev wrote in The New York Times, “With
enough political will, any problems of compliance with the existing treaties
could be resolved” and, “There will be no winner in a ‘war of all against all’
– particularly if it ends in a nuclear war.” One need not love Russian
President Vladimir Putin to acknowledge the importance of Russia’s Foreign
Ministry saying, “There is still room for dialogue.”
The INF
Treaty came into force in 1987, bringing the Cold War to an end even
before the Berlin Wall was breached and the Soviet empire collapsed. The Treaty
requires elimination and permanent renunciation of future deployment of all US
and Russian nuclear and conventional ground-launched cruise and ballistic
missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,500 miles. It greatly reduced (but did not
eliminate) the danger of Europe becoming the initial theater and victim of a
US-Soviet (now Russian) apocalyptic nuclear war.
Abandoning the Treaty — combined with the possible expiration of the New
START Treaty if it is not soon extended — will eliminate all
nuclear arms agreements between the world’s two largest and most dangerous
nuclear powers, paving the way for an unrestrained and mind-bogglingly costly
nuclear arms race.
The danger posed by nuclear weapons and the arms
race are not abstractions. Both great powers already use their nuclear arsenals
dangerously to reinforce or expand their imperial spheres of influence. For
example, the US threatened possible nuclear attacks on the eves of the 1991 and
2003 Iraq wars, with former President Obama’s “all options on the table”
threats against Iran and President Trump’s “fire and fury” threat against North
Korea. Further, Putin stated that
he considered the use of nuclear weapons to ensure Russian control of Crimea.
Trump’s nuclear arms racing only adds to the dangers of nuclear war as a result
of miscalculations and accidents.
The decision to abandon the Treaty is
part-and-parcel of Trump’s unilateralist “America First” vision of US global
dominance. Beyond ostensible concerns about possible Russian cruise-missile
testing, Trump and company have complained that the INF Treaty restricts
the Pentagon’s ability to offset China’s military modernization. Thus,
withdrawal from the Treaty needs to be seen along with the Navy’s provocative
South China Sea “freedom of navigation exercises” and the
disastrous trade war as another element of Trump’s nationally self-defeating
campaign to weaken and contain China – not to mention Trump’s and National
Security Adviser John Bolton’s disregard for treaties and international
cooperation.
The decision to abandon the Treaty is part-and-parcel of Trump’s
unilateralist “America First” vision of US global dominance.
While withdrawal from the INF Treaty is a
dangerous escalation on its own terms, it comes in the context of more than two
decades of increasingly aggressive US military policies in relation to Russia:
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) expansion to Russia’s borders, which was
initiated during the Clinton administration; withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty by
the Bush II-Cheney administration; the Obama administration’s commitment to
spend $1.2 trillion (expanded to $1.7 trillion under Trump) to
develop a new generation of US nuclear weapons and their delivery systems,
deployment of missile defenses which Moscow fears could be converted into
nuclear-armed first strike missiles; and the decision to deploy upgraded and “more
usable” US nuclear weapons to five European NATO nations.
Committed to the doctrine of mutually assured
destruction, President Putin reiterated Russia’s commitment to maintain the
balance of forces with the United States. Russian nuclear-capable missiles have
now been deployed to Kaliningrad in the heart of
Central Europe. Further, in order to evade or overwhelm US missile defenses,
Russia is deploying a new long-range multiple
warhead missile, hypersonic cruise and other missiles capable of flying up to
five times the speed of sound, and has pledged to deploy a nuclear-powered
“unmanned underwater vehicle” capable of destroying port cities with nuclear weapons.
We risk losing everything if we fail to add
nuclear disarmament and peace to our list of progressive, life-affirming and
democratic demands as we confront the Trump administration. Our list of demands
should include preservation and reinforcement of the INF Treaty, opposition to
what has become the $1.7 trillion US nuclear weapons upgrade, support for
the Markey-Lieu legislation that would prevent
presidential first-use of nuclear weapons, and renewed commitments to
fulfilling the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty’s obligation to “good faith”
negotiations by the nuclear powers for the elimination of their nuclear
arsenals. The last thing the world needs is a new Cold War that threatens human
survival.
Copyright © Truthout.
Dr. Joseph Gerson is president of the Campaign
for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security and director of the
American Friends Service Committee's Peace and Economic Security Program.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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