Walking back her remarks from earlier in the day, U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison said Tuesday she did not mean to suggest the United States would pre-emptively attack any Russian missiles it believes could operate in the range prohibited by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.
“I was not talking about preemptively striking Russia,” Hutchison wrote in a post on Twitter at about 3 p.m. Eastern time Tuesday. “My point: [Russia] needs to return to INF Treaty compliance or we will need to match its capabilities to protect US & NATO interests. The current situation, with [Russia] in blatant violation, is untenable.”
Hutchison caused an international stir early Tuesday in Brussels, when she told reporters ahead of the NATO defense ministers meeting that the U.S. would “take out” any INF-range missiles Russia developed and fielded.
In a Russian language statement distributed Tuesday by the Moscow-owned TASS news agency, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova accused Hutchison of speaking recklessly, but appeared not to interpret the ambassador’s remarks as a threat of a pre-emptive strike.
“It seems that people making such statements do not realize the degree of their responsibility and the dangers of aggressive rhetoric,” Zakharova said in a statement. Zakharova thought Hutchison was talking about “the possibility of shooting down Russian missiles,” according to the statement.
The INF Treaty, signed in 1987, prohibits Russia and the U.S. from fielding ground-based cruise and ballistic missiles with flight ranges between 500 kilometers and 5,500 kilometers, or about 310 miles and 3,100 miles. The measure’s ratification precipitated a massive reduction in the number of deployed tactical nuclear weapons — lower-yield weapons intended to be launched from a site near a conflict zone — by both nations.
The Barack Obama administration said the Russian Federation violated the INF in 2014 by testing a ground-launched cruise missile capable of operating in the range forbidden by the treaty. Russia says the missile, designated 9M729, does not violate the treaty.
In the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed in August, Congress gave the president until Jan. 15 to determine whether Russia is still in breach of the INF Treaty. The legislation also said that if the president determines Russia is continuing to violate the accord, the United States could suspend its obligations under the INF. In 2018, Congress authorized the Pentagon to study a missile that could operate in the range prohibited by the INF Treaty.
