© Dennis Paquin / ReutersUS President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, December 8, 1987
This week marks the 30-year anniversary of the INF treaty between the US and the Soviet Union, a deal that saw thousands of missiles destroyed and sped up the end of the Cold War. Now the US seems to want to torpedo the agreement.
The INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) treaty was signed in December 1987. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to Washington to put his signature next to that of US President Ronald Reagan, resulting in an unprecedented
scaling down of the two superpowers' arsenals.
The treaty covers missiles of two range classes: short (500 to 1,000km, or 310 to 620 miles) and intermediate (1,000 to 5,000km, or 620 to 3,420 miles), with both nuclear and conventional payloads, but only those with land-based launchers. Further production and use by the two nations of other state missile types has since been banned.
The treaty came into force on June 1, 1988. Over the following three years, the US destroyed 846 of its missiles and 32 launch sites, and
the USSR destroyed 1,846 missiles and 117 sites. Each sent numerous inspectors to one another's sites to confirm compliance.
The deal brought much-needed
detente to an atmosphere of tense, Cold War stand-off, and allowed Europe, which housed much of the American arsenal, to breathe a sigh of relief.
© Herman Pieterse / Agence France-PresseDutch demonstrate against the deployment of US Pershing cruise missiles in the Netherlands, 29 October 1983
Signing the INF was widely seen a gesture of good will by Mikhail Gorbachev, seeing as it dealt a stronger blow to the Soviets' national defense than to the Americans'. Apart from the fact that
the arsenal the USSR destroyed was over twice as large (it even threw some 400km-range missiles into the mix), the deal didn't affect aircraft- and sea-based missiles, an area where the US had a clear strategic advantage at the time. A lot of Soviet military brass were understandably unhappy about Gorbachev's decision to put global stability above the USSR's national safety.
Another problem with the INF treaty was that other nuclear-armed nations were never party to it - including US allies France and the UK, as well as China. In spite of the flaws, Russia never suggested relaxing the treaty's limitations, focusing instead on developing sea- and air-based arms of its own. Neither did it threaten to ditch the deal - until the US pushed it to.
Threats and accusationsFast-forward 30 years, and the US is accusing Russia of violating the INF and is preparing
sanctions for those supposedly involved in the breach. According to Washington's
vague claims, Russia has secretly developed intermediate-range missiles that can be fired from the tactical missile system Iskander-M, deployed along the country's western borders.
Russia has its own, rather clearly-defined issues with how the US interprets the INF treaty.
Moscow has pointed to a series of ballistic missiles that are used in the US as targets for anti-missile system tests, as being in violation. It also believes the INF should cover heavy combat drones, a staple of American air power. The drones, Russia argues, fall under the
definition of cruise missile outlined in the treaty, being
"an unmanned, self-propelled vehicle that sustains flight through the use of aerodynamic lift over most of its flight path."
© Anton Denisov / SputnikSoviet intermediate-range missile RSD-10 Pioneer (NATO reporting name SS-20 Saber) in a military museum
But most of all Russia is worried about America's capability to launch Tomahawk missiles from land-based anti-missile systems stationed in Europe. Such launchers have already been deployed in Romania and are earmarked for location in Poland. Their deployment itself is a result of Washington torpedoing another missile-related agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 2002, coincidentally, a few days after it, too, turned 30.
While accusing Russia of violating the INF treaty, the US is
already developing a new missile deployed once the deal is dead.
Russia has vowed to observe the INF treaty as long as the US does. Should Washington choose to pull out like it did from the ABM deal, though, the response will be
"immediate and mirror-like," Russian President Vladimir Putin said in October 2017.
- We 'lost' the Cold War.
- Russia at present certainly has no designs to control the world, while that is the ONLY goal for the US. Why?
America we can no longer compete on an economic basis. This is a direct result of intentional policies to weaken freedoms and home and eventually cause / help to occur the PTB's Plan of Action: A "One World Government" that's not, (as per the US claimed design) from the bottom up - each person is a sovereign representative of themselves and is more important than the government, which was to be made up of 'Public SERVANTS!'
Some of the steps our sorry ass government and PTB have done to get us here have included:
- intentional offshoring of jobs by PTB and paid off politicians who care more about being bribed than taking care of Americans.
- Importing as many humans as possible to water down the individual average American's reasonable expectation of individual freedom; i.e., the right to be left alone,.
- America's immigration policies made sense and it made sense to take more people in (back in the days when the government encouraged assimilation by immigrants. For the last thirty plus years though, it's encouraged the exact opposite; including no expectation of learning English language, etc.
- Back when I was 13, I first made the point that America's open borders no longer made any sense and only increased the likelihood of poverty, intra-citizen conflict, etc. When America first began, sure it made sense for the country to import folks. But as I first asked back then: "Why don't we just pay to import people from the poorest places in the world, until we have the same average gross income per citizen as a typical citizen on the Earth?"
THAT was why I then said and have never retracted, that at some point after 1776 and 1899, the time came to realize that we no longer needed more people here.
- The list goes on and on, but it is all to get Americans mad at each other so as to divide and conquer even more of our country and freedoms than they have achieved so far.
And our now second generation of dumbed-down citizens have allowed our country to get led by the nose to the slaughter house.
In our youth, America was truly #1 in stuff like health care, infant mortality average income, etc. And now, America is #1 ONLY in selling weapons, having an oversized government and military; and creating conflicts to get folks to buy the weapons.
The purpose of war has become exactly as Orwell predicted in Nineteen Eighty Four: an ongoing/endless war just to keep the proles too scared and dumbed down to understand or care.
The rest of the events have all been per the PTB's plan of action. This is a huge step backwards, which couldn't have been done 20 years ago. Americans might have raised hell.... maybe. But then again, they eagerly traded 'liberty' for the mere illusion of 'security' after 9/11.2001.
Again, such an action by the US reveals the false 'Wizard' behind the curtain, which yells in a bully's voice "ignore that man" who says the US has become a war monger!!!"
In truth, the US is now a force to be reckoned with ONLY in the same way that Hitler's Germany was a force to be accepted by Czechoslovakia, at least if they wished to continue as a nation.
AmeriKa's government and idiot citizenry have betrayed AmeriCans. I wonder how long we have of freedom left before the next false flag based martial law.
SBT.
R.C.