Serious USA to Russia: Let forget about treaty and start to make nuke business pse!

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https://www.rt.com/news/396734-russi...uclear-cotton/


Russia-US missile treaty should be bypassed by helping allies make nukes – GOP Senator
Published time: 18 Jul, 2017 22:35
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Russia-US missile treaty should be bypassed by helping allies make nukes – GOP Senator
FILE PHOTO: Pershing II missiles © Department of Defense / Wikipedia
A Republican senator has proposed a way around the landmark Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between Russia and the US by urging Washington to provide its allies with the technology and assistance to build the very missiles banned by the accord.

The INF Treaty, signed by Soviet Union and the US 1987, bans the testing, production and possession of land-based intermediate-range missiles by both Moscow and Washington.

It enabled the scrapping hundreds of nuclear-tipped missiles deployed in Europe amid the Cold War arms race. The missiles needed so little time to fly in case of an attack, that both sides had virtually no time to react to a launch warning, posing a grave threat of launching a nuclear war by mistake.
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The deckhouse of the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System (AAMDS) at Deveselu air base, Romania © Adel Al-Haddad US withdrawal from INF Treaty would hit America itself & European allies – Russian senator

However, Senator Tom Cotton, who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the US should skirt around the accord during a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. Tuesday.

He urged the White House to “facilitate the transfer of cruise missile technology to our (American) allies,” explaining that “only the US and Russia have signed this treaty. No other country did.”

“So, even if we can’t build intermediate-range missiles – that doesn’t mean our allies can’t. And also it doesn’t mean that we can’t help them,” he added.

The Senator said he wasn’t bothered by the fact that the move would undermine the spirit and intention of the INF treaty, when questioned by RT’s Jacqeline Vouga.

“Well, Vladimir Putin is violating the letter of it (INF). So, if someone is accusing the US of violating the spirit of it, I’m not terribly concerned about it,” he replied casually.

READ MORE: Russia slams US arms control report as ‘biased’, says it ignores Washington’s violations

Cotton accused Russia of non-compliance with INF treaty, saying his proposal is aimed at making Moscow play by the rules.

“Should they not do that than, obviously, we shouldn’t remain in a treaty where we become literally the only country on earth that refrains from building a particular kind of weapons system," he said.

READ MORE: US has ‘no defense’ against Russian cruise missiles – STRATCOM chief

The Trump administration is currently reviewing American nuclear posture, with the issue of staying or leaving the INF also on the agenda.

In February, the US accused Russia of deploying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range exiting the declared figure and banned under the treaty. Russia denied the accusation.

Moscow has its own list of complaints over US shortcomings on fulfilling the INF Treaty. For starters, Moscow says the US drone program technically violates it and that target missiles used by the US to test ABM technology have a range banned by the INF and can be potentially weaponized.

Russia is also concerned by the placement of naval vertical launch systems as part of the AEGIS Ashore deployment in Eastern Europe. The launchers are the same as those used by US warships to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles, leading Russia to deduce that the antimissile sites can be used to fire such missiles and thus violate the INF.





http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/to...rticle/2627148


Tom Cotton: US has to win nuclear 'arms race' with Russia and China
by Joel Gehrke | Jun 26, 2017, 6:35 PM

U.S. military researchers "are on the cusp of some pretty major breakthroughs" in missile defense that are necessary to win potential wars with China and Russia, according to a leading Republican lawmaker.

"It's better to win an arms race than lose a war," Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., told the Center for the National Interest on Monday.

Cotton, an Army infantry veteran who sits on the Armed Services Committee, anchored that statement in Russia's ongoing violation of arms control treaty governing the development of intermediate-range nuclear weapons. But that violation is emblematic of a broader problem. Technological advances have rendered the Cold War principle of mutally-assured-destruction insufficient to avert the nuclear war. Russia and China, he said, have already developed plans for "limited" use of nuclear weapons to win conventional wars. And that requires an overhaul of U.S. defenses, according to the lawmaker.

"We need to be able to stop an attack from near-peer adversaries as well," Cotton said.

A bipartisan group of senators, including Cotton, has proposed legislation to ramp up the development of intercontinental ballistic missile interceptors and even space-based sensors to detect launches. Cotton also called for a repeal of the defense spending caps that Congress adopted in 2011, as part of a standoff over debt ceiling and spending legislation. "The Budget Control Act was passed in 2011 in a very different world than we face now," Cotton said.

Lawmakers and national security experts cite North Korea and Iran as the threats that require missile defense development, but China and Russia have often insisted that U.S. officials were hiding their true intentions. Cotton's admission that he's concerned about Russia and China could strengthen their resolve to oppose the deployment off ballistic missile defense systems in South Korea, for example.

But the Arkansas lawmaker argued that the ground has already shifted, as Russia is in violation of a nuclear weapons treaty negotiated during the Reagan era, while much of China's nuclear capabilities remain hidden from the United States.

"If our adversaries are contemplating the use of nuclear forces as part of normal warfare, then I would suggest we'd be best advised to develop ballistic missile defenses instead of clinging to a deterrence framework that they have already discarded," Cotton said.

Some of the proposals evoke the Ronald Reagan-era Strategic Defensive Initiative that, at the time, was derided by Democratic leaders as a "Star Wars" fantasy. Cotton, for instance, suggested the development of long-range, high-endurance drones armed with lasers that could intercept and destroy nuclear weapons over the nation that fired them.

"The experts who do this work at the Missile Defense Agency and more broadly within the Pentagon or outside experts are pretty confident that with higher levels of investment ... we are on the cusp of some pretty major breakthroughs," Cotton said.


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