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(Washington, D.C.): Russian President Vladimir Putin has now added scrapping a treaty limiting conventional armaments in Europe to the list of possible Russian responses to U.S. plans to station missile interceptors and a missile-tracking radar in Eastern Europe. A trio of arms control experts recommended today that Washington halt its European missile defense deployment plan and instead focus on engaging with Moscow to reassess and reenergize efforts to help transform their strategic relations from competition to cooperation, in part, by adopting a more ambitious arms control agenda.
The Bush administration has erroneously asserted that arms control is unnecessary between friends and can serve as a source of tension. Although the United States and Russia are no longer foes, unfortunately, they are not yet allies, and their arms holdings and deployments continue to engender distrust. Indeed, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov stated in a Rossiiskaya Gazeta interview published Feb. 21 that the U.S. approach of not seeking to “restrain each other” is dangerous because “it carries the risk of generating the same old arms race, since neither of us is likely to want to lag behind too much.”
Russia’s harsh reactions to U.S. plans to base 10 missile interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic underscore the poor state of affairs. Putin announced last week that Russia will suspend and potentially end its adherence to the 1990 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty, which caps the amount of tanks, artillery, and other conventional weaponry that its 30 states-parties deploy in Europe. This declaration followed the Kremlin’s threats to withdraw from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which prohibits U.S. and Russian possession of nuclear and conventional ground-launched missiles with ranges between 500 to 5,500 kilometers. And, as a report in the forthcoming May issue of Arms Control Today details, Russia also is warning that a proposed U.S.-Russian center to share information on missile launches worldwide could be shelved.
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