The Glade 4.0

Holy ****.. universal disarmament isn't going to happen guys. The genie has been out of the bottle for 70 years. You can't put it back in, and you're going to get out-ruthlessed by the Russians at every turn as long as you keep pretending you can.

Russia cheating on INF treaty.

This should surprise no one. Russia considers the use of nuclear weapons an integral part of its military strategy. It's intended to offset technological weaknesses. Just dump the treaty already; it's of no more use than the ABM treaty was.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm not sure. We're technologically more advanced. The treaty would benefit us greatly if it were followed. Assuming it's violated, there may still be some benefit to forcing those violations to be constrained or hidden, and there may be value in having a mechanism for us to ***** about it. There's also a certain value to the US being able to say they are trying.

What do we gain by dumping the treaty? What does Russia gain? Who comes off better?

In theory this is true, but in practice the underlined part has been the rub. Arms control treaties have a history of one side wanting the arms control for the sake of arms control thinking they'll save a lot of money and usher in peace, and the other side thinking they'll gain an advantage trying to get around it. In some cases, such as the ABM treaty, they set us way back on developing actual defenses against nuclear weapons in pursuit of "stability" that was largely transient - it was worthwhile only as long as the defensive technology was primitive and the offensive technology limited to 4 or 5 major powers.



It's pretty hard to find a tangible gain for us, no matter what we do - keep the treaty or scrap it. Intangibly, it removes from us the need to comply with a treaty that our counterpart isn't particularly interested in, and hopefully moves their programs more into the open. I don't really see us developing new GLCM or IRBM systems ourselves any time soon, but that might change in the next decade depending on where we go with Prompt Global Strike - a system I think is best avoided, but if we do develop it I don't see any reason to diddle about with an aging treaty.

It's important to remember that this treaty applies ONLY to us and the Russians, and was almost exclusively a product of the 1970s-1980s situation in Europe. Russian developments with the Tu-22 and the SS-20 made British, French, and our European ground-based systems suddenly much more vulnerable, so at the time it probably seemed like a good idea to try to take intermediate systems out of play. The problem with this always was that Russia, geographically, is in a totally different situation from us. Aside from the U.S., potential enemies for them are close by making INF systems very attractive, and those potential enemies are not limited to Europe.

This should really not be news. Russia has been saying since 2007 that the treaty is not in its interests.



Basically, the treaty prevents us from having systems we don't need very much anyhow, while preventing the Russians from having highly desireable systems. On the surface this might seem like a great deal, but as noted in your firs paragraph, that's if it's complied with - and even then, these are systems that can't reach the U.S. It's of more benefit to France and Britain, and for that matter China, but it doesn't bind them, so it mainly becomes an issue of Russia having no incentive to comply with the treaty at all as it's basically with the wrong people for it to have any benefit to them.

Therefore, we're stuck with it as a political albatross that maintains the illusion of arms control and weapons limits and such, but in reality does none of that. Domestically, the idea of a "world without nuclear weapons" plays well, and no politician (least of all Obama) is likely to readily give it up because no one wants to have to calmly explain to the public (much of which will simply not accept) that we are not going to get rid of nuclear weapons with treaties, any more than we will get rid of guns with laws. The fewer nuclear weapons there are in the world the more attractive owning those that remain becomes, and it's just a question of how many more decades we will continue to pretend disarmament is really a goal.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

All right! Another cold war means we'll get to have video games and movies where Russians are the bad guys again. Bring on the remakes of Rocky IV and Rush'n Attack!

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

This was exactly my point. The Russians gain big by dumping the treaty, we don't. By leaving it in place, the Russians may not adhere to it, but they might be more inclined to pay lip service at least, which could potentially slow them down a bit.

Slowing them down isn't much of a benefit. We decided the treaty was desirable because of the vast improvements they made way back in the 1980s; it isn't like they need to make major breakthroughs to get these sorts of things. They also aren't the sorts of systems they'd use against us because they lack the range. They'd use them against the Chinese or other regional powers.

They also aren't really "gaining big" by dumping the treaty because they aren't going to adhere to it anyhow, and already said it's not in their interests. Politically, it makes us look more in control to simply say "fine, if you won't abide, it's off." thus giving us the theoretical option to develop systems like this as a counter to theirs, even though we really won't need to. The other potential benefit for us is making it easier to collect intel on what they are doing; deployments and numbers and such.

More cynically, it might get the Europeans to get a little more serious about defense since these systems do threaten them. They can either try to negotiate their own treaty, or come up with their own defenses, but it removes the bizarre situation of us being in a treaty that prohibits us from having stuff we don't need in order to get the Russians not to do something they're going to do anyhow, for the benefit of various third parties.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."