IMAGENS DE OVOODOCORVO
Trump administration determined to exit treaty
reducing risk of war
Mike Pompeo and Mark Esper agreed to proceed with US
withdrawal of Open Skies Treaty despite pandemic, sources say
Julian
Borger in Washington
Sun 5 Apr
2020 11.30 BSTLast modified on Sun 5 Apr 2020 13.04 BST
The Trump
administration is determined to withdraw from a 28-year-old treaty intended to
reduce the risk of an accidental war between the west and Russia by allowing
reconnaissance flights over each other’s territory.
Despite the
coronavirus pandemic, which has put off a full national security council (NSC)
meeting on the Open Skies Treaty (OST), the secretary of defence, Mark Esper,
and secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, have agreed to proceed with a US exit,
according to two sources familiar with administration planning.
A statement
of intent is expected soon, with a formal notification of withdrawal issued a
few months later, possibly at the end of the fiscal year in September. The US would
cease to be a party to the treaty six months after that, so if a new president
were elected in November, the decision could be reversed before taking effect.
Because of
the Covid-19 pandemic, reconnaissance flights under the treaty have been
suspended until 26 April.
The US has
complained about what it says are Russian infringements of the treaty, which
was signed in 1992 and has been in force since 2002: limitations on flights
over the Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad to less than 500km and the creation of
an exclusion corridor along the border of the Russian-occupied regions of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia.
Russia
imposed the limitation over Kaliningrad after a prolonged zigzagging Polish
overflight in 2014 closed down aviation for a day. Russia allowed an extended
flight over Kaliningrad in February.
One of the
reasons Esper has cited for US withdrawal is to save money by not replacing the
two Boeing OC-135B planes the US uses for its Open Skies reconnaissance
flights.
Congress
appropriated $41.5m last year for the cost of replacement but the Pentagon
spending request published in February contained no budget for the new planes.
Esper told Congress he was awaiting a decision from the president.
Three
Republican hawks in the Senate, Richard Burr, Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, sent a
letter to the administration in March calling for withdrawal, for cost and
security reasons.
“The costs
of the OST go far beyond wasteful spending, and directly erode our national
security by enabling Russian espionage over the United States,” the senators
wrote.
Supporters
of the Open Skies Treaty say the US and its allies benefit from it more than
Russia, with three times more overflights of Russian territory than Russia
flights over US and allied territory.
Furthermore,
US withdrawal would not stop Russian reconnaissance flights over US bases in
Europe.
“The
administration has yet to put forward any proposals on how to fix the two main
issues that we’re having with the treaty, and our allies have reiterated again
and again, that they do not want us to leave the treaty,” said Alexandra Bell,
a former state department arms control official and now senior policy director
at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “The administration
doesn’t seem to have any plan of what to do about US bases in Europe.”
The
Democratic senators Bob Menendez and Jack Reed wrote to the administration in
February, saying: “The Open Skies Treaty is an important multilateral agreement
that operates as a critical transparency tool for the United States and our
allied treaty partners. It provides the United States and our partners
real-time, comprehensive images of Russian military facilities.
“If this
administration moves forward with a precipitous unilateral withdrawal from the
treaty the United States will be less safe and secure,”
Last year,
the US set out questionnaires to its allies about their views on the treaty’s
value. The UK and other Europeans sent emphatic appeals for the US to remain
part of the agreement. Ukraine also publicly underlined the strategic
importance it attaches to the treaty. But the administration has so far not
shared the result of its survey with Congress.
The NSC was
due to conduct a “principals meeting” of top administration officials in
February to discuss two options: immediate announcement of withdrawal, or a
period of a few months consultation with allies pending a final decision, as a
final warning to Russia.
The
principals meeting was put off until 11 March and then postponed again, in the
face of the pandemic. But the absence of an NSC discussion does not appear to have
stopped the momentum for US withdrawal.
The Open
Skies Treaty is the latest arms control agreement to be targeted by the Trump
administration, which has walked out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and the
Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia.
Daryl
Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said: “At a time
when the need for international cooperation, couldn’t be any more obvious, with
respect to dealing with the coronavirus pandemic, it is foreign policy
malpractice for the Donald J Trump administration to withdraw from a treaty
that has been in effect for nearly 30 years against the wishes of the United
States closest allies in Europe.”
The nuclear arms race is back … and ever more
dangerous now
Simon
Tisdall
Donald Trump has increased spending on America’s
arsenal while ripping up cold war treaties. Russia and China are following suit
Sat 17 Aug
2019 14.00 BSTLast modified on Sat 17 Aug 2019 21.24 BST
Imagine the
uproar if the entire populations of York, Portsmouth or Swindon were suddenly
exposed to three times the permissible level of penetrating gamma radiation, or
what the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford termed gamma rays. The outpouring
of rage and fear would be heard across the world.
That’s what
happened to the roughly 200,000 people who live in the similarly sized northern
Russian city of Severodvinsk on 8 August, after an explosion at a nearby
top-secret missile testing range. Russia’s weather service, Rosgidromet,
recorded radiation levels up to 16 times higher than the usual ambient rate.
Yet the
incident has been met with surly silence by Russia. It was five days before
officials confirmed a blast at the Nyonoksa range had killed several people,
including nuclear scientists. No apologies were offered to Severodvinsk
residents. There is still little reliable information. “Accidents,
unfortunately, happen,” a Kremlin spokesman said.
That
callous insouciance is not universally shared. According to western experts,
the explosion was caused by the launch failure of a new nuclear-powered cruise
missile, one of many advanced weapons being developed by Russia, the US and
China in an accelerating global nuclear arms race.
Vladimir
Putin unveiled the missile, known in Russia as the Storm Petrel and by Nato as
Skyfall, in March last year, claiming its unlimited range and manoeuvrability
would render it “invincible”. The Russian president’s boasts look less credible
now.
But Putin
is undeterred. Denying suggestions that the missile is unreliable, the Kremlin
insisted Russia was winning the nuclear race. “Our president has repeatedly
said that Russian engineering in this sector significantly outstrips … other
countries,” a spokesman said.
Now fast-forward
to 16 August, and another threatening event: the test-firing by North Korea of
potentially nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, the sixth round of launches
since July. More than two years of vanity diplomacy by Donald Trump has not
convinced Pyongyang it is safe to give up its nukes – proof, if it were needed,
that unilateral counter-proliferation initiatives do not work.
Arms
control experts say a consistent, joined-up international approach is woefully
lacking. Thus Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal is tolerated, and the idea of
a bomb developed by Saudi Arabia is no longer ruled out. But the merest hint
that Iran may build a nuclear weapon is greeted with megatons of hypocritical
horror.
In a sense,
the problem is circular. Putin argues that Russia’s build-up is a response to
destabilising US moves to modernise and expand its own nuclear arsenal – and he
has a point. Barack Obama, the former president, developed a $1.2tn plan to
maintain and replace the “triad” of US air, sea and land-based nuclear weapons.
Trump has
gone much further. The Pentagon’s nuclear posture review, published last year,
proposed an additional $500bn in spending, including $17bn for low-yield,
tactical nuclear weapons that could be used on conventional battlefields. The
first of these new warheads is due to become operational next month.
Critics in
Congress say low-yield weapons make nuclear warfare more likely, and oppose
Trump’s budget increases. But with US planners saying the biggest national
security threat is no longer terrorism but nuclear-armed states, there is
little doubt that many new weapons projects will get the go-ahead.
The renewed
nuclear arms race is a product of Trump’s America First outlook and that of
comparable ultra-nationalist and insecure regimes elsewhere. Trump’s emphasis
on defending the “homeland” is leading inexorably to the militarisation of US
society, whether at the Mexican border, on inner-city streets or in its
approach to international security.
“We have
far more money than anybody else by far,” Trump said last October. “We’ll build
up until [Russia and China] come to their senses.” Outspending the opposition
was a tactic employed by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. And Trump is putting
taxpayers’ money where his mouth is. Overall, annual US military spending is
soaring, from $716bn this year to a proposed $750bn next year.
The paradox
is that even as the risk of nuclear confrontation grows, the cold war system of
treaties that helped prevent Armageddon is being dismantled, largely at Trump’s
behest. Earlier this month, the US withdrew from the 1987 Intermediate-range
Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty with Russia (which rid Britain and Europe of US
missiles deployed in the early 80s).
The US is
also signalling it will not renew the New Start strategic nuclear weapons
treaty when it expires in 2021. Washington claims Moscow cheated on the INF
pact; Russia denies it. But the real US concern is that both treaties tie its hands,
especially regarding China – another example of the impact of America First
thinking.
This
increasingly unregulated, three-way contest poses indisputable dangers. The US
plans were “unnecessary, unsustainable, and unsafe” and “increase the risks of
miscalculation, unintended escalation, and accelerated global nuclear
competition”, the independent US-based Arms Control Association said in April.
With a much
smaller arsenal than the US and Russia, China, too, is “aggressively developing
its next generation of nuclear weapons”, according to a major Chinese weapons
research institute. Nor, given Moscow’s and Washington’s behaviour, has it an
incentive to stop, despite Trump’s vague proposal for a trilateral disarmament
“grand bargain”.
Like the
US, China – while historically pledged to “no first use” – wants potential
enemies to believe it may actually use tactical nukes. As Dr Strangelove would
doubtless appreciate, this, perversely, increases the chances that it will.
The
dreadful example these nuclear arms-racers are setting to non-nuclear states
such as Iran is obvious. By failing to uphold arms control agreements,
neglecting collaborative counter-proliferation efforts, and building new, more
“usable”, dangerously unproved weapons like the one that irradiated
Severodvinsk, the nuclear powers are digging their own graves – and ours.
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