US, Russia tension flares over N-arms control now at risk

Bloomberg

As tensions escalate between Russia and the US, the nuclear-armed former Cold War rivals are risking the future of decades-old arms control agreements that have helped to keep a strategic balance and prevent the risk of accidental war.
The conflict played out at a global security conference in Germany where Russia aired grievances about the US and the Trump administration said a new nuclear doctrine unveiled this month doesn’t increase risks. Germany, caught in between, was among European countries voicing concern as both big powers modernize their nuclear arsenals.
US National Security Adviser H.R McMaster defended the US nuclear posture, which envisages building more low-yield bombs, and renewed accusations that Russia is violating a 1987 treaty that bans the deployment of intermediate-range missiles on land. “We will not allow Russia any of the power to hold the populations of Europe hostage,” he said Saturday in Munich, appearing on stage moments after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov listed a litany of complaints about US-led military expansion since the collapse of Communism.

Syria Clash
Efforts to bridge the divide are stymied by a poisoned atmosphere as the US responds to alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential vote, with 13 Russians indicted including a businessman close to President Vladimir Putin. The two powers are also clashing in Syria, where US strikes killed more than 200 Russian mercenaries who attacked American-backed forces on February 7, according to people familiar with the matter.
“In the US, the animus is so tremendous that punishing Russia is the thing to do,” Dmitri Trenin, head of the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in an interview. “I see the demise of the entire arms control regime.”
While the two countries have fulfilled the terms of another landmark nuclear weapons reduction treaty, New START, that accord expires in 2021 and there’s political pressure on President Donald Trump to let it expire because of the alleged Russian non-compliance with the INF treaty. Moscow in turn accuses Washington of itself breaking the intermediate-range pact. So far, no formal negotiations are taking place on either issue.

European Fears
Javier Solana, a Spaniard who served as NATO secretary-general, and Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s acting foreign minister, expressed alarm.
“The most likely theater for nuclear conflicts would once again be here, in the center of Europe,” Gabriel told the conference.
Graham Allison, a Pentagon adviser under former US President Ronald Reagan when the two superpowers were negotiating arms control, said he’s skeptical momentum will be found to revive START and the INF.
Arms control was developed primarily to prevent the “insane” possibility that Russia and the US would annihilate each other due to miscalculation or accident, despite not even wanting to go to war, said Allison, now a professor of government at Harvard University. “Those risks remain today.” That’s something the Russians can agree on. According to Sergei Karaganov, a former Kremlin foreign policy adviser, the situation could get “much more dangerous” than during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Under New START, which followed from the 1991 START treaty and was signed in 2010, the Russian and US arsenals are restricted to no more than 1,550 deployed strategic warheads on no more than 700 deployed strategic missiles and bombers.