The dance around the INF Treaty is over: What next?
On February 2, as promised, Washington, speculating on unsubstantiated claims against Russia “destroy your terrible 9M729 missile, otherwise I’ll stop being friends,” began withdrawing from the INF Treaty. However, to save face, Trump still said that the Treaty would hang for another six months in the latrine on a nail and go to waste in the event “if Russia does not return to compliance by destroying missiles, installations and related equipment, violating the contract."
However, none of the observers can be misled by these verbal decorations. America did not decide to break the Treaty in order to conduct some negotiations. America needs global dominance to maintain its status as a World Hegemon, and Trump, who has unleashed a disastrous second presidential term, has to wash himself with a steel brush and bleach from the image of a “Putin appointee” and actively wave to the “hawks.”
The Russian Ministry of Defense actually declassified the 9M729 missile, putting it on public display and disclosing some performance characteristics points, from which it followed that the missile’s range was 50 km less than the 500 km limit specified in the document. Russia invited the Americans to conduct an inspection of suspicious missile systems by experts on a mutual basis with an unprecedented level of openness, but the United States has not been muddying the waters for many years in order to easily reveal its cards.
Washington is not planning to dismantle its own ground-based Mk.41 missile defense launchers in Poland and Romania, which can be turned into launchers for tomahawks in a matter of hours. “What is this? We didn’t violate anything!” - officials in the White House stare innocently.
Europe, despite expressing official regrets about the dismantling of the INF Treaty, dutifully followed the Hegemon like a goat on a string, although it’s a no-brainer that if something happens, it will have to be the first to suffer for supporting American ambitions of global dominance.
Where in 30 years has active anti-war Europe gone, which fiercely protested against the deployment of American Pershings? She became bald, lost her teeth, degraded, slipped into deep insanity and servility.
China took an interesting position on the issue of eliminating the INF Treaty. Cunning comrades from the Middle Kingdom called on Russia and the United States to return to dialogue and resolve differences. But at the same time they themselves spoke out against third countries joining the Treaty and turning it into a multilateral agreement.
To be honest, the cunning position of our eastern strategic partner, armed with medium- and shorter-range missiles, has been known for a long time and is one of the reasons why it is no longer profitable for the United States to comply with the INF Treaty.
However, blaming China alone for being too cunning is hardly correct, since there are also India, Pakistan, and North Korea, which have their own INF arsenals, but also do not plan to abandon such a serious instrument of military deterrence.
However, it has long been clear from the behavior of the United States that the idea of wiping out the INF Treaty is so firmly ingrained in the heads of the establishment that sometimes the cap on Washington thieves begins to spontaneously combust.
The most powerful fire was the recent announcement by the American military about the creation in the United States of a kind of supergun capable of spitting projectiles over a range of 1600 km.
The idea of a supergun is reminiscent of the efforts of the gloomy Teutonic genius to create miracle guns capable of shelling Paris and London from a safe distance. An example that suggests itself is the impressive, terribly expensive, but absolutely useless Colossal weapon, the shells of which clung to near space in the upper part of the trajectory. However, all modern scientific research says that, based on existing technologies, it is impossible to build a weapon capable of throwing projectiles more than 100 km, because everything depends on the barrier of propagation of sound waves in powder gases, limited to less than 2000 m/sec.
On paper there are projects of the so-called. light gas guns, theoretically capable of firing at a distance of over 1000 km, but in practice no one in the world has dealt with this topic. Fruitful research is being carried out on
the creation and testing of shipborne railguns, but their range is limited to at most tens of nautical miles, and the explosive is a tungsten blank accelerated to cosmic speeds. It is pointless to shoot more than 1000 km from a railgun, even if one ever appears.
Thus, the Americans indirectly confirmed that their “supergun” is most likely a medium-range missile, and under this sauce the United States has long been violating the INF Treaty by developing prohibited weapons.
It should be noted that medium- and shorter-range missiles are tempting for the United States for several reasons. Firstly, they are much cheaper than ICBMs (small weight and size parameters, low-power nuclear charge, deployment near the borders of a potential enemy). Secondly, America has been running around for decades with the delusional idea of a limited nuclear war in Europe and the creation of low-yield nuclear weapons as battlefield weapons. Thirdly, as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 showed, retaliatory measures to deploy the same missiles in the immediate vicinity of the United States put the world on the brink of a nuclear disaster.
Taking into account the inadequacy of the modern American elite, consisting of former yuppies and hippies who have not seen or smelled war personally and are firmly convinced that they will be able to sit out nuclear armageddon across the Atlantic puddle, the consequences may be unpredictable.
What is Russia doing in response to America's destabilization of the global security system?
On Saturday, February 2, Putin held a meeting in the Kremlin with the ministers of defense and foreign affairs, at which it was officially announced that Russia was forced to suspend its participation in the INF Treaty.
Foreign Minister Lavrov said that de jure the United States began to violate the Treaty since 1999, by launching the development and testing of unmanned aerial vehicles that match the characteristics of prohibited ground-based missiles.
Russia's response will be symmetrical, but our country does not intend to repeat the mistakes of the USSR and be drawn into an arms race. Currently, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are armed with air- and sea-launched Kalibr cruise missiles, for which ground launchers will be deployed. The development of hypersonic ballistic missiles will continue with adjustments for the possibility of their ground deployment.
To this end, in 2019, an adjustment will be made to the country’s defense budget, the state program of rearmament and state defense procurement, without inflating the budget of the Russian Ministry of Defense.
This was not said at the meeting, but it should be assumed that a number of other steps will be taken that will negate the possible advantages of “our American partners” gained as a result of the dismantling of the INF Treaty.
One of the obvious steps is the deployment of “calibers” in the immediate vicinity of Poland and Romania. Less obvious ones include reducing the flight time of Russian mobile-based ballistic missiles through the deployment of complexes in the Arctic zone. This option is good because it will become extremely difficult for the United States and its allies to intercept missiles at launch and during the accelerating part of their trajectory with Aegis missile defense systems.
There is another option that has long excited minds inside and outside Russia, the option of modernizing the Iskander-M missiles, increasing their range beyond 500 km. I would not be surprised if such a possibility was built into the design of the complexes from the very beginning, since the Americans have been murmuring about withdrawing from the INF Treaty since 2002.
In addition to Russia, some kind of reaction to the dismantling of the INF Treaty should also follow from China, since, under the guise of ensuring the safety of South Korean and Japanese allies from “Juche” missiles, the United States will probably deploy ground-based missiles somewhere in the Seoul area. For China, this is a more than real threat of a hellish man-made disaster in the industrialized provinces of the Southeast from the destruction of the Three Gorges Dam. The escape of 22 billion cubic meters of water is not a joke at all. The accident 20 years ago claimed the lives of 4000 people and left 14 million people homeless in China.
In general, the United States is doing everything to fuel nuclear psychosis in the spirit of the second half of the 1950s. If things continue to develop in the same direction, then we should expect a new round of popular demand for family anti-nuclear bunkers, the popularization of thermonuclear war in mass culture, and American officials flying out of the windows of their own offices shouting “The Russians are coming!”
The INF Treaty's Roundabout Dance Is Over: What's Next?