Russia Exits INF, Arms Race Looms

Steven Starr on the clear and present nuclear danger...

Professor Steven Starr is the former director of the Clinical Laboratory Science Program at the University of Missouri. His work on nuclear issues has appeared in both the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the Federation of American Scientists.

Russia has announced that it will no longer adhere to the terms of the INF Treaty, which Trump, at the urging of his neoconservative National Security Adviser John Bolton, withdrew from in 2019.

Russia will now answer any Western deployment of missiles -- including land, sea, and air systems -- with a tit-for-tat deployments. This includes the deployment of medium range nuclear-armed missiles in Europe.

The US and Germany have agreed to deploy U.S. ground-launched, medium-range missiles in Germany starting in 2026. These missiles will inevitably be armed with nuclear warheads.

In 2024, Dr. Theodore Postol, professor emeritus at MIT,explained that the nuclear-capable intermediate-range ballistic missiles that the U.S. is planning on putting in Germany will give the Russian military only 6 to 8 minutes warning time (after being detected by ground-based Russian Early Warning System radar) before the warheads carried by these missiles strike Moscow. In his warning, Postol stated: "This is the beginning of the construction of an unrecoverable crisis that will lead to World War 3."

Russia will deploy Oreshnik missiles to Belarus within the next 5 months, where they can hit any target in Europe and the UK in a matter of a few minutes. The US has no air defense systems that can intercept maneuverable hypersonic Oreshnik missiles, which can carry both non-nuclear and nuclear warheads.

Oreshnik has the capability to travel from Brest (Belarus) to a US Air Force base in southern Romania in just 5.5 minutes, and to reach another base in Poland in just 3.2 minutes. In addition, it is claimed that the weapon could similarly reach several European capitals, including Paris and London, in less than 9 minutes.

Although the missile's estimated range of 5,500 kilometres (3,418 miles) is less than the distance between Belarus and US territory, it could reach US bases in Europe, as well as in the Middle East and Gulf states.

Dr. Postol has calculated that the conventional warheads carried by one Oreshnik missile have a maximum destructive power equivalent to approximately 5 tons of TNT. These warheads strike with the speed of a meteorite and go deep into the Earth, where they self-destruct and will pulverize deeply buried shelters, weapons depots, and command centers. A group of these missiles can destroy a large airbase; no NATO facility in Europe can be protected from destruction by these weapons.

Would the US and NATO respond with nuclear weapons if their bases are destroyed by conventional warheads carried by Oreshniks?