Iran Press/ America: After speaking at a rally in Elko, Nevada, on Saturday (October 20, 2018), US President Donald Trump told reporters that he will pull the United States out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) with Russia that was created by the Reagan administration in 1986.
"Russia has violated the agreement. They've been violating it for many years," Trump told reporters before leaving Nevada following a campaign rally, Reuters reported.
"And I don't know why President Obama didn't negotiate or pull out. And we're not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we're not allowed to," he said. "We're the ones that have stayed in the agreement and we've honored the agreement.
"But Russia has not, unfortunately, honored the agreement. So we're going to terminate the agreement. We're gonna pull out," Trump said of the agreement, which was signed in December 1987 by former US President Ronald Reagan and USSR President Mikhail Gorbachecv.
Gorbachev and Reagan sign the INF Treaty, 8 December 1987.
Asked to clarify, the Trump said: “Unless Russia comes to us and China comes to us and they all come to us and they say, ‘Let’s all of us get smart and let’s none of us develop those weapons,’ but if Russia’s doing it and if China’s doing it and we’re adhering to the agreement, that’s unacceptable. So we have a tremendous amount of money to play with our military.”
The Guardian reported on Friday that Trump’s third national security adviser, John Bolton, a longstanding opponent of arms control treaties, was pushing for US withdrawal. The US says Russia has been violating the INF agreement with the development and deployment of a new cruise missile. Under the terms of the treaty, it would take six months for US withdrawal to take effect.
US hawks have also argued that the INF treaty ties the country’s hands in its strategic rivalry with China in the Pacific, with no response to Chinese medium-range missiles that could threaten US bases, allies and shipping.
Bolton and the top arms control adviser in the National Security Council (NSC), Tim Morrison, are also opposed to the extension of another major pillar of arms control, the 2010 New Start agreement with Russia, which limited the number of deployed strategic warheads on either side to 1,550. That agreement, signed by Barack Obama and Dmitri Medvedev, then president of Russia, is due to expire in 2021.
Russian state news agencies on Saturday cited a foreign ministry source as saying Washington’s move to pull out of the treaty is motivated by a dream of a single global superpower, according to The Guardian.
“The main motive is a dream of a unipolar world. Will it come true? No,” a foreign ministry source told Ria Novosti state news agency.
The official said that Russia has “many times publicly denounced the US policy course towards dismantling the nuclear deal”.
Washington “has approached this step over the course of many years by deliberately and step-by-step destroying the basis for the agreement,” the official said, quoted by Russia’s three main news agencies.
Trump said the United States will develop the weapons unless Russia and China agree to a halt on development.
China is not a party to the treaty and has invested heavily in conventional missiles as part of an anti-access/area denial strategy, while the INF has banned U.S possession of ground- launched ballistic missiles or cruise missiles of ranges between 500 and 5,500 km (311 and 3,418 miles).
The INF treaty forced US and Russia to eliminate ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between approximately 300 and 3,400 miles. It offered a blanket of protection to the United States' European allies and marked a watershed agreement between two nations at the center of the arms race during the Cold War.
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