U.S. and Russian officials on Wednesday renewed claims that their governments had violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty and sparred over the consequences of aggressive rhetoric toward one another. Jon Wolfsthal, senior director for arms control and nonproliferation at the National Security Council, said at the ExchangeMonitor Nuclear Deterrence Summit that the U.S. seeks a resolution regarding Russia’s violation of the INF Treaty.
The 1987 INF Treaty required the U.S. and then-Soviet Union to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers. In 2014, the Department of State determined that Russia violated a core tenet of the treaty not to produce or flight test an intermediate-range ground-launched cruise missile, and has said it will consider economic and military responses. While the State Department has not elaborated on details of the violation, analysts have said the allegation might be based on a flight test of an RS-26 ballistic missile or R-511 cruise missile.
Sergey Kislyak, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, denied the charge, saying allegations of noncompliance are “black” and have not been explained properly by U.S. officials. Kislyak said Russia would like the United States to come back into compliance of the treaty, but Wolfsthal scoffed at the notion that there had been a U.S. breach in the first place. Russia has claimed that U.S. target missile tests for global missile defense and armed drone production violate the treaty.
Wolfsthal called the treaty violation claim a “false allegation” for which “if there is a sincere concern on the part of our Russian counterparts to . . . discuss these [issues] again then we are ready and prepared to do that, but only as part of a two-way discussion.” He added that “Russian security that will suffer more as a result of violating this treaty” and that it would be “politically challenging” to execute a follow-on agreement to the New START nuclear arms control accord while Moscow is breaching an older treaty.
