Nuclear Bargaining Chips in a Protracted Arms Race

Posted: November 1st, 2018

By Walter Pincus

Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist Walter Pincus is a contributing senior national security columnist for The Cipher Brief. He spent forty years at The Washington Post, writing on topics that ranged from nuclear weapons to politics. He is the author of Blown to Hell: America's Deadly Betrayal of the Marshall Islanders. Pincus won an Emmy in 1981 and was the recipient of the Arthur Ross Award from the American Academy for Diplomacy in 2010. He was also a team member for a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 and the George Polk Award in 1978.

OPINION — President Donald Trump’s recent threat to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) provides another false justification for adding to a needless, nuclear arms race that is already underway.

Yes, the United States has a right to protest the fact that the Russians are breaking limitations written into the INF treaty, which eliminated U.S. and Soviet nuclear systems with ranges of between 310 and 3,420 miles. Moscow’s development and deployment of a new, nuclear-capable, land-based, cruise missile with that kind of range, known in this country as the SSC-8, does violate the treaty.

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