Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

US tests cruise missile BANNED by expired INF treaty

RT | August 19, 2019

The US military has tested a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of over 500km, the Pentagon confirmed. Such weapons were banned under the INF arms control treaty, which the US exited this month.

The flight test of a “conventionally configured ground-launched cruise missile” was conducted on August 18 at a range on San Nicolas Island, California, the US Department of Defense said Monday. After a successful launch, the missile struck its target more than 500km (310 miles) away.

Weapons with a range of between 500km and 5,000km were banned under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty, a key arms control mechanism that helped de-escalate Cold War nuclear tensions when it was signed in 1987.

In February this year, the US announced it was quitting the treaty, accusing Russia of having a non-compliant missile system. Moscow denied the accusations and invited inspections of the system, but no one took it up on the offer. The treaty expired on August 1.

The Trump administration had previously signaled it was determined to exit the INF back in October 2018, when National Security Advisor John Bolton described it as a “relic of the Cold War” during his visit to Moscow.

“There’s a new strategic reality out there,” Bolton told reporters at the time, describing the INF as a “bilateral treaty in a multipolar ballistic missile world,” that applied only to the US and Russia in Europe and did not do anything to constrain the actions of China, Iran or North Korea.

The INF was the second major Cold War arms control treaty the US led the way in dismantling, following the demise of the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in 2001. The sole remaining arms control treaty, New START, is due to expire in February 2021.

August 19, 2019 - Posted by | Militarism |

1 Comment »

  1. The USA Government is the first one to complain about Nth Korea, Iran or anyone else testing missiles, but they actually BROKE a TREATY to allow them to test new missiles…..Who can trust the USA Government these days?……not even the American people…..

    Like

    Comment by Brian Harry, Australia | August 19, 2019 | Reply


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

« Previous | Next »