U.S. President Donald Trump has announced that the United States is suspending its participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty that banned nuclear-armed cruise and ballistic missiles with ranges between 310 and 3,240 miles. The U.S. government has long accused Russia of violating the agreement, and full withdrawal is expected to occur within a few months. NATO backed the U.S. action; new intermediate-range Russian missiles have been a matter of great concern to many in the alliance. Russian President Vladimir Putin responded with an announcement that his country also was suspending participation in the agreement, with withdrawal to follow.
The U.S. withdrawal, and NATO’s support, were extraordinary. Arms control treaties typically are valued in themselves, as symbols of cooperation. Reports of treaty evasion often are met with a response that minor violations are not nearly as important as maintaining the treaty process. Naval historians will recognize echoes of the interwar period, when the U.S. and British governments resolutely ignored considerable evidence the Germans and Italians were grossly exceeding treaty limits on warship size. Even when Japan—a major target of the treaty system—withdrew, it was not at all easy for Western governments to abandon the system.
The lesson of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks and the interwar naval treaties should be that arms control is pointless unless each side is credibly perceived as willing to enforce agreements or walk away. But public pressure in democracies can make that very difficult; leaving a treaty seems to be an offensive, rather than defensive, step. Putin has declared that Russia welcomes the freedom of action it gains by INF’s termination, but it is not at all clear that it should. If anything, the Russian economy is weaker than the Soviet economy was, and Western economies are stronger. Russian missile development reflects Putin’s realization that his relatively weak economy cannot support powerful conventional forces.
The U.S. State Department also accuses Russia of violating the Open Skies Treaty, the Chemical Warfare Convention, and the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty. All were part of the confidence-building efforts that marked the closing phase of the Cold War. Open Skies allowed both sides to overfly each other and inspect military installations from the air. Such inspection probably did not mean much in a world of satellite photography, but it had symbolic value. Two recent examples make it clear Russia has not abandoned chemical weapons, despite protestations to the contrary: the attempted murder of an ex–Russian spy and his daughter in England with a military chemical weapon and Russia’s support of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s chemical attacks on his own population. The CFE required each side to report enough details of its strength and operations to make surprise attacks more difficult.
It may be forgotten that the INF Treaty was a major victory for the West. The Soviets agreed to the treaty after the United States and NATO deployed long-range nuclear-armed Pershing and ground-launched Tomahawk missiles in the face of Soviet attempts at intimidation. These weapons would not have had a decisive impact on a war, but they demonstrated that earlier Soviet deployment of broadly equivalent missiles had not intimidated NATO governments. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to eliminate these missiles because he realized he could not maintain a credible threat against NATO. Putin’s revival of just such a threat is directed against the Central European governments that broke loose from the Warsaw Pact at the end of the Cold War.
The U.S. action does not hinge on technicalities or minor violations. It was prompted by a rapid buildup of nuclear missiles in the European part of Russia, including the Kaliningrad Oblast (formerly East Prussia), an enclave on the Baltic between Poland and Lithuania. These missiles seem to have no purpose other than to intimidate central European NATO countries. None has an army capable of attacking Russian territory, so the nuclear weapons cannot be seen as a counterbalance to an invasion of Russian territory. They look more like the firepower the Russian Army would need to support an advance to its west. Some Soviet plans for attacking Western Europe included massive nuclear bombardments, but Western strategists concluded that it would be practically impossible to advance across an area that had been hit by nuclear weapons. The weapons might stop an invader, but that was all they could do. In an offensive role, then, nuclear weapons mainly intimidate.
Putin has chosen to emphasize nuclear weapons and to proclaim, at least inside Russia, that nuclear war is fightable and winnable. The Soviet government made similar claims, but the population was cynical about the communist government, and the claims had little impact. By all accounts, Russians now are more willing to accept what Mr. Putin is selling. He has stoked bitterness toward the West as well as his country’s classic sense of victimhood.
Putin’s strategy avoid s traditional emphases on mass and massed firepower, because neither is really affordable. The new Russian concept of hybrid warfare emphasizes the use of special forces and cyberweapons. All were in evidence during operations against Ukraine and Georgia, especially in the spectacular cyber-attacks that paralyzed Georgia’s banking system and government. Russian strategy also has a political component, promoting illiberal nationalist movements, and Central Europe has a past full of such regimes.
The political strategy and nuclear intimidation go together. Russia’s biggest success in Central Europe so far seems to be NATO member Hungary, whose Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently announced that he wants his country to be neutral—in effect, leaning toward Putin. That he can take such a position is remarkable, given what his country suffered during the Cold War, including the brutal suppression of its 1956 revolt against the Soviets.
The weapon that killed the treaty is the Kalibr (3M54) cruise missile, a modern equivalent of the U.S. Tomahawk; its export version is called Klub. The U.S. government has claimed since 2014 that the Kalibr’s range exceeds the 310-mile (500-kilometer) limit—a claim substantiated by its use against targets in Syria, launched more than 1,000 miles away in the Caspian Sea. The U.S. withdrawal was anything but sudden, therefore, especially in light of strong Russian pressure on central European NATO members to keep them from deploying defensive missile systems, such Aegis Ashore, that might reduce the credibility of Putin’s threats. As long as the United States adhered to the INF treaty, it could not deploy nuclear weapons in NATO territory to balance the threat.
The Russian military regards conventional Kalibrs as vital precision weapons, and it gave them their first operational test in Syria, launching a large number from both ships and submarines. Like the U.S. Tomahawk, a Kalibr can be fired from a standard vertical-launch cell on board ships of many sizes. The naval version was never limited by treaty, but the existence of a nuclear land-based version suggests that Russian warships also possess the nuclear capability. Kalibr is the size of Tomahawk, and its effective range depends on a trade-off between warhead weight and fuel stowage. Some versions, such as the 3M54T and 3M54K variants (NATO designation SS-N-27 Sizzler), are antiship missiles.
During the Cold War, the United States responded to the prospect that the Soviets might launch nuclear antiship missiles at U.S. warships with a declaration that any such attack would be considered equivalent to a nuclear attack on U.S. soil and could be answered with an overwhelming nuclear response. Fortunately, this doctrine was never tested. Today’s Western alliance is more dependent on the sea—and therefore more vulnerable to nuclear attack at sea—than land-oriented Russian. Apart from strategic submarines, the U.S. Navy no longer deploys naval nuclear weapons. Should that change? There is talk of deploying low-yield nuclear weapons at sea.
NATO must consider deploying a counter to the new Russian nuclear missiles. NATO’s weapons have to hold Russian territory at risk, so Russia will perceive the high potential cost to any nuclear attack on a European NATO country. Keeping some of the NATO weapons at sea would make it much more difficult for Russia to deal with them. Deploying nuclear Tomahawks on board a variety of surface ships in the Cold War forced the Soviets to track and trail almost all U.S. warships within range of the Soviet Union—a far more daunting task than tracking and trailing only carriers and major amphibious ships. Today’s improved computer and surveillance technology make it easier to do so, but it remains a difficult challenge. Putting some nuclear Tomahawks on board attack submarines would further complicate the task.