Recently, more and more questions have arisen regarding the operation of the Treaty between the USSR and the United States on the elimination of their intermediate and shorter-range missiles (INF) of December 8, 1987. From time to time, both in Russia and in the United States there are statements about the possibility of getting out of it. Of course, first of all, this concerns the stability of this agreement - does it correspond to the realities of today? To do this, you need to recall the conditions for the deployment of the INF Treaty and the history of the negotiations, as well as assess the current threats.
POLITICAL ASPECTS OF THE DEPLOYMENT OF THE RSD
The decision to deploy medium-range missiles (IRBMs) in Europe dates back to the administration of US President Jimmy Carter. According to Henry Kissinger, “in essence, the case for medium-range weapons was political, not strategic,” and stemmed from the very concerns that had previously sparked the strategic debate among NATO allies. “If America's European allies truly believed in its willingness to resort to nuclear retaliation with weapons located in the continental United States or sea-based, new missiles on European soil would not be needed. But America’s resolve to do this has been called into question by European leaders.”
The coming to power in 1977 of President Jimmy Carter increased the tension between the White House administration and the West German partners.
The United States believed that, due to its specificity, Europe could not be the main theater of military operations with the use of nuclear weapons. Here, it was planned to use neutron and high-precision weapons against the Soviet armed forces. In this regard, in the military-political circles of Germany, there were fears that the United States is seeking to "regionalize" the possibility of a nuclear war.
In a speech at the London Institute for Strategic Studies in October 1977, German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt insisted on maintaining political and military equilibrium as a prerequisite for security and detente. He feared that the American allies would either "surrender" Western Europe or turn it into a "battlefield." Bonn feared that Europe would become a "bargaining chip" in the Soviet-American confrontation. In essence, G. Schmidt's position reflected the structural conflict that was taking place in NATO during this period.
America has tried to allay European fears. This means that the question was whether Western Europe can count on US nuclear weapons in the event of repelling a Soviet attack aimed at Europe.
There are other, more complex explanations. In particular, it was argued that the new weapon initially allegedly combined the strategic defense of Europe with the strategic defense of the United States. At the same time, it was argued that the Soviet Union would not launch attacks with superior conventional forces until the medium-range missiles in Europe were destroyed, which, due to their proximity and accuracy of hitting, could disable Soviet command posts and provide US strategic forces with an all-devastating first blow. Thus, the RSD closed the gap in the "deterrent" system. In this case, the defense of Europe and the United States would find themselves in a "bundle": the Soviet Union would be deprived of the opportunity to attack any of these territories without the risk of an unacceptable nuclear war of a general nature.
It should be borne in mind that such a "bunch" was a response, according to G. Kissinger, and the growing fears of German neutralism throughout Europe, especially in France. After the defeat of the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany G. Schmidt in 1982, European circles began to fear the return of the Social Democratic Party of Germany to the position of nationalism and neutralism. As part of the discussion that opened in Germany regarding the US strategy, the famous SPD politician Egon Bar wrote that morality and ethics are more important than Atlantic solidarity and that agreement with the new American strategy will complicate the prospects for the unification of the two German states. French President François Mitterrand in 1983 became a zealous champion of the American plan for the deployment of medium-range missiles. Speaking in the German Bundestag, he said: "Anyone who plays for the separation of the European continent from the American, is capable, in our opinion, of destroying the balance of power and, consequently, hindering the preservation of peace."
In May 1978, when, according to NATO estimates, the Soviet Union deployed the first 50 medium-range missile systems SS-20 (RSD-10 "Pioneer"), the General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Leonid Brezhnev visited Bonn. The meeting with German Chancellor G. Schmidt was reduced to a discussion of the problem of "Euro-missiles". Brezhnev rejected Schmidt's accusations that the Soviet Union was seeking unilateral military superiority. The famous Soviet diplomat Julius Kvitsinsky (USSR ambassador to the FRG in 1981-1986) explained the German policy by the fact that the West German leadership was in a hurry with the idea of uniting the country. In his opinion, West German diplomacy sought to “get from the USSR really significant and unilateral reductions in its nuclear potential with all the political and psychological consequences of this for the situation in Europe. Germany was in a hurry. She feared that it would be practically impossible to restore the unity of Germany in 30-50 years."
From the point of view of G. Kissinger, expressed in his monograph "Diplomacy", L. I. Brezhnev and his successor Yu. V. Andropov used opposition to the deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe to weaken Germany's ties with NATO. He writes that when Helmut Kohl visited the Kremlin in July 1983, Yuri Andropov warned the German Chancellor that if he agreed to the deployment of Pershigov-2, “the military threat to West Germany would increase many times over, relations between our two countries would also necessarily undergo serious complications. " “As for the Germans in Federal Germany and the German Democratic Republic, they will have, as someone recently said (in Pravda), to look through a dense palisade of missiles,” Andropov said.
MILITARY POINT OF VIEW
On the other hand, from a military point of view, the deployment of US medium-range missiles was part of a "flexible response" strategy and gave Washington the opportunity to choose intermediate options for a general war aimed at America. In the mid-1970s, first in the United States and then in the USSR, laser, infrared and television missile guidance systems were created on targets. This made it possible to achieve high accuracy of hitting the target (up to 30 meters). Experts started talking about the possibility of a decapitation or "blinding" nuclear strike, which would allow the elite of the opposite side to be destroyed before a decision on a retaliatory strike is made. This led to the idea of the possibility of winning a "limited nuclear war" by gaining in flight time. US Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger announced on August 17, 1973, the concept of a decapitation (otherwise - counter-elite) strike as the new basis of US nuclear policy. The emphasis in deterrence shifted to medium and shorter-range weapons. In 1974, this approach was enshrined in key documents on the US nuclear strategy.
In order to implement the doctrine, the United States began to modify the Forward Based System located in Western Europe. As part of this plan, US-British cooperation on submarine ballistic missiles and medium-range missiles has increased. In 1974, Britain and France signed the Ottawa Declaration, under which they pledged to develop a common defense system, including the nuclear sphere.
In 1976, Dmitry Ustinov became the Minister of Defense of the USSR, who was inclined towards a tough response to US actions to implement the "flexible response" strategy. To this end, the USSR began to build up ICBMs with MIRVs and at the same time provide cover for the "European strategic" direction. In 1977, the USSR, under the pretext of modifying the outdated RSD-4 and RSD-5 complexes, began deploying the RSD-10 Pioneer on the western borders, each of which was equipped with three warheads for individual targeting. This allowed the USSR in a matter of minutes to destroy NATO's military infrastructure in Western Europe - command centers, command posts and especially ports (the latter, in the event of a war, made it impossible for American troops to land in Western Europe).
NATO APPROACHES
The NATO countries did not have a unified approach to assessing the deployment of new Soviet missiles. At a meeting with three Western European leaders - Helmut Schmidt, Valerie Giscard d'Estaing and James Callaghan - in Guadeloupe in 1979, Jimmy Carter promised to deploy American missiles in Europe. However, this was not enough for the leaders of Germany and Great Britain. They also insisted on a policy of mutual missile reduction in Europe. At the same time, the question of the effectiveness of NATO in countering the "Soviet threat" was raised in a harsh manner to the American president.
This achieved the "dual-track" policy adopted by NATO at the Council session in Brussels on 12 December 1979. NATO's decision provided for the deployment on the territory of European countries of 572 American Pershing-2 IRBMs and cruise missiles (108 and 464, respectively) in parallel with the initiation of negotiations with the USSR to restore the military-political balance. The short flight time of the Pershing-2 missiles (8-10 minutes) gave the United States the opportunity to strike the first strike at the command posts and launchers of Soviet ICBMs.
Negotiations under the “double solution” policy failed. Until November 1981, negotiations on "Euro-missiles" had not begun.
ZERO OPTION
In November 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan won the presidential elections in the United States, and he adhered to a tougher approach. American political scientist Bradford Burns stated that “President R. Reagan pursued US foreign policy, proceeding from the conviction that the global power of the United States should be absolute in the last decade of the 20th century. The main thing in this conviction is the need and the ability to impose one's will on the whole world."
In 1981, the Reagan administration proposed a "zero option" unacceptable for the Soviet side - the United States does not deploy medium-range and cruise missiles in Europe, and the USSR eliminates its RSD-10 Pioneer missiles. Naturally, the USSR abandoned it. First, there were no American missiles in Europe, and the Soviet leadership considered the "elimination of the Pioneers" an unequal exchange. Secondly, the American approach did not take into account the RSM of Great Britain and France. In response, Brezhnev in 1981 put forward an "absolute zero" program: the withdrawal of the RSD-10 should be accompanied not only by the US refusal to deploy the Pershing-2 RSD, but also by the withdrawal of tactical nuclear weapons from Europe, as well as the elimination of the American forward-based system. In addition, the British and French RSDs were to be eliminated. The United States did not accept these proposals, citing the superiority of the USSR (Warsaw Pact) in conventional armed forces.
In 1982, the Soviet position was corrected. The USSR declared a temporary moratorium on the deployment of the RSD-10 Pioneer pending the signing of a comprehensive agreement. In addition, in 1982 it was proposed to reduce the number of RSD-10 "Pioneer" to a similar number of French and British RSDs. But this position did not arouse understanding among the NATO countries. France and Britain declared their nuclear arsenals "independent" and declared that the problem of deploying American IRBMs in Western Europe is primarily a question of Soviet-American relations.
PACKAGE LOCKING
An attempt by the United States to establish a "missile fence" in Europe was successfully thwarted by Moscow. Photo from the site www.defenseimagery.mil
This changed in March 1983, when the Reagan administration announced the launch of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) program. SDI envisaged the creation of a full-scale space-based missile defense system, which could intercept Soviet ICBMs in the acceleration phase of the flight path. The analysis showed that the combination of "Euro-missile - SDI" poses a threat to the security of the USSR: first, the enemy will inflict a decapitation strike with "Euro-missiles", then - counterforce with the help of ICBMs with MIRVed missiles, and subsequently intercept the weakened strike of strategic nuclear forces with the help of SDI. Therefore, in August 1983, Yuri Andropov, who came to power on November 10, 1982, said that negotiations on the IRBM would be conducted only in a package with negotiations on space weapons (SDI). At the same time, the USSR assumed unilateral obligations not to test anti-satellite weapons. These events are called "package blocking".
But the United States did not agree to conduct "package" negotiations. In September 1983, they began to deploy their missiles in the UK, Italy, Belgium. On November 22, 1983, the German Bundestag voted to deploy Pershing-2 missiles in Germany. This was perceived negatively in the USSR. On November 24, 1983, Yuri Andropov made a special statement, which spoke about the growing danger of a nuclear war in Europe, the USSR's withdrawal from the Geneva talks on "Euro-missiles" and the adoption of retaliatory measures - the deployment of operational-tactical missiles "Oka" (OTP-23) in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. With a range of up to 400 km, they could practically shoot through the entire territory of the FRG, inflicting a preemptive disarming strike at the locations of the Pershing. At the same time, the USSR sent its nuclear submarines with ballistic missiles close to the US coast on combat patrols.
UNLOCKING THE PACKAGE
An attempt to renew contacts began after the death of Yuri Andropov. His funeral on February 14, 1984 was attended by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US Vice President George W. Bush. They offered to resume negotiations on "Euro-missiles" on condition that the USSR "unblocks the package." Moscow agreed to resume negotiations only on "package" terms. On June 29, 1984, the USSR, in a special note, offered to resume negotiations. However, the United States rejected these proposals. As the Soviet Union continued to deploy OTR-23 in Czechoslovakia and the German Democratic Republic, the United States announced in the summer of 1984 the deployment of Lance tactical missiles with neutron warheads.
Promotion was achieved on February 7, 1985. At a meeting in Geneva, USSR Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and US Secretary of State George Shultz agreed that negotiations on "Euro-missiles" would be held separately from negotiations on space weapons.
Negotiations resumed after the election of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on March 10, 1985. The USSR and the USA began discussing the terms of the negotiations. America did not achieve great success in SDI research, since it was difficult to create an effective missile defense system at that level of development of science and technology. But the Soviet leadership feared the unpredictable consequences of an arms race in space. According to Zbigniew Bzezhinski, “the SDI project reflected the timely realization of the fact that the dynamics of technological development is changing the relationship between offensive and defensive weapons, and the perimeter of the national security system is moving into outer space. SDI, however, focused mainly on one single threat from the Soviet Union. With the disappearance of the threat, the project itself lost its meaning."
By this time, the position of the USSR in the negotiations had changed. In the summer of 1985, Moscow imposed a moratorium on the deployment of OTR-23 in Czechoslovakia and the GDR. Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan made an attempt to reach an agreement at the talks in Geneva in November 1985. It ended in failure: the United States refused to withdraw the RSD from Europe, and the USSR was close to re-blocking the package. But after Gorbachev announced in January 1986 a program for the phased elimination of nuclear weapons around the world, the USSR made a number of serious concessions. At a meeting in Reykjavik on October 10-12, 1986, Mikhail Gorbachev proposed a large-scale reduction in nuclear weapons, but only "in a package" with the US abandoning SDI. Since it was not possible to agree on general nuclear missile disarmament, the parties decided to start with the most acute problem - medium-range missiles in Europe. The USSR agreed to "unblock the package" - to negotiate the RSM separately from the SDI.
DOUBLE ZERO
In the fall of 1986, Moscow proposed the option of withdrawing the RSD: the USSR is withdrawing the Pioneer missiles beyond the Urals, and the United States is exporting the Pershing-2 and ground-based cruise missiles to North America. Washington agreed to accept this option. However, on December 24, 1986, Japan strongly opposed him. Tokyo feared that the USSR would retarget the RSD-10 Pioneer to Japan. On January 1, 1987, the PRC also opposed it, where they also feared retargeting the RSD-10 "Pioneer" at Chinese targets.
As a result, in February 1987, the USSR proposed a new conceptual “double zero” approach. However, on April 13-14, 1987, US Secretary of State J. Schultz, who flew to Moscow, demanded that shorter-range missiles be added to the agreement - the Oka operational tactical missiles (OTR-23).
The Oka complex was unique in terms of the adopted technical solutions and their execution and had no analogues in the world. The Oka missile has never been tested at a range of more than 400 km and, in accordance with this accepted criterion, should not have fallen into the number of limited ones. Despite this, Schultz expressed indignation at the fact that the USSR is trying to "smuggle" dangerous weapons, referring to the somewhat smaller radius of its action. The Americans threatened that in response to the Soviet Union's refusal to dismantle the Oka, they would modernize the Lance missile and deploy it in Europe, which would renounce nuclear disarmament. Marshal of the Soviet Union Sergei Akhromeev was against the concession on the Oka missile. It should also be noted that the liquidation of the Oka OTRK in the working bodies (the so-called "small and big five"), in which drafts of directives for negotiations were prepared, did not go through the approval procedure. These working bodies included, respectively, senior officials and the leadership of the Central Committee of the CPSU, the Military-Industrial Commission, the Ministry of Defense, the KGB and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The final agreement was reached at negotiations with the participation of Eduard Shevardnadze in Washington in September 1987. The USSR agreed to develop a unified classification for the INF Treaty and include the OCR Oka in the future treaty, although they did not fall under the definition of the INF Treaty. The United States, in turn, promised to destroy the Tomahawk land-based cruise missiles and abandon the deployment of the Lance-2 OTR with neutron warheads in Central Europe.
On December 8, 1987, the Washington Treaty was signed, under which the parties agreed to destroy medium (1000 to 5500 km) and shorter (500 to 1000 km) range missiles as a class of nuclear missiles under the control of their inspectors. The INF Treaty stipulates not to produce, test or deploy such missiles. It can be said that with the achievement of an agreement on the destruction of the "Euro-missiles", the "nuclear Euro-strikes" also disappeared. It was the forerunner of the Treaty between the USSR and the United States on the Reduction and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START-1).
CONTEMPORARY THREATS AND CHALLENGES TO RUSSIA
The dilemmas of national security in the first decades of the 21st century are naturally qualitatively different from the dilemmas of the 20th century. At the same time, the traditionally adopted strategic views, of course, remain fundamental to security. Moreover, as long as the world's leading states continue to improve and develop new types of weapons, maintaining technological superiority or parity between them remains an important imperative of their national security and foreign policy.
According to Z. Bzezhinsky, which he outlined in his book Choice: World Domination or Global Leadership, “number one in the list of threats to international security - a full-scale strategic war - still poses a higher-order threat, although it is no longer the most likely prospect. … In the coming years, maintaining the stability of the nuclear deterrence of the United States and Russia will remain one of the main tasks of the American political leadership in the field of security …
At the same time, the United States-led, scientific and technological revolution in military affairs should be expected to bring to the fore a variety of means of warfare below the nuclear threshold and, more generally, to devalue the central role of nuclear weapons in modern conflict. … It is likely that the United States will make - if necessary, then unilaterally, a significant reduction in its nuclear potential while simultaneously deploying one or another version of the anti-missile defense system.
This approach is currently being implemented by the United States in the "rapid global strike" strategy, which provides for a devastating disarming strike with offensive precision modern conventional weapons in the shortest possible time against targets anywhere in the world, combined with a possible counterstrike with "impenetrable" global missile defense systems. Thus, the United States, while lowering the nuclear threshold, projects at the same time military power over the entire globe, thus achieving global military domination. This is facilitated by the presence of powerful navies that control the space of the World Ocean, as well as the presence of more than 700 American military bases in 130 countries. Thus, America's possession of the scale of geopolitical superiority currently incomparable with other countries gives it the opportunity to decisively intervene.
As far as European security is concerned, politically, after the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the transition of Central Europe to the fold of the West, maintaining NATO as a defensive alliance against the already defunct threat does not seem to make any sense. However, based on the views of Bzezhinski, “the European Union and NATO have no choice: in order not to lose the laurels acquired in the Cold War, they are forced to expand, even if with the entry of each new member the political cohesion of the European Union is disrupted and the military-operational interaction within the Atlantic organization is complicated. …
In the longer term, European enlargement will remain the single main objective, which would be most facilitated by the political and geographic complementarity of the EU and NATO structures. Enlargement is the best guarantee of such steady changes in the European security landscape that will expand the perimeter of the central zone of world peace, facilitate the absorption of Russia by the expanding West and involve Europe in joint efforts with America in the name of strengthening global security."
Here I have the right to ask the question, what kind of Russia is Bzezhinsky talking about? About that, apparently, Yeltsin's Russia, which, according to him, after the end of the Cold War was "relegated to a middle-level power." But it is unlikely that Russia can exist in such a status, since it has historically taken shape and developed as a great world power.
With regard to the weak link facilitating the absorption of Russia, the outstanding Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin wrote in his article “On the Dismemberment of Russia”: “Some believe that the first victim will be a politically and strategically impotent Ukraine, which at a favorable moment will be easily occupied and annexed from the West; and after her the Caucasus will quickly ripen for conquest”.
Henry Kissinger's views on the approaches of some Western politicians to the question of possible ways of Russia's integration into the Western community are curious. In particular, Russia's accession to NATO and possible membership in the European Union as a counterweight to the United States and Germany. “None of these courses are appropriate … Russia's NATO membership will turn the Atlantic Alliance into a security instrument like a mini-UN or, on the contrary, into an anti-Asian - especially anti-Chinese - alliance of Western industrial democracies. Russian membership in the European Union, on the other hand, would divide the two shores of the Atlantic. Such a move would inevitably push Europe in its quest for self-identification to further alienate the United States and force Washington to pursue appropriate policies in the rest of the world."
At present, thanks to the aggressive US foreign policy and the efforts of the NATO countries led by Washington, which provoked the "Ukrainian crisis", Europe has once again become a "field" of aggravated confrontation between Russia and the West.
The degree of confrontation between the two nuclear powers has increased significantly. The approach of NATO forces to the borders of Russia and the deployment of NATO and American bases, including global strategic missile defense systems, in Eastern European countries upset the balance in the international security coordinate system. At the same time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, for the first time, Russia's potential adversaries gained an advantage in conventional armed forces on the European continent. Once again, on the security agenda, the issue of the flight time of offensive weapons, allowing a decapitation strike, arises. This problem may become critical in the event of a technological breakthrough in the field of creating hypersonic weapons delivery vehicles, which, according to expert estimates, may occur in the next 10 years. The process of NATO enlargement shows that the presence of strategic nuclear forces in Russia, proceeding from the paradigm of modern development, in the future will become increasingly difficult to turn into political advantages.
The Ukrainian crisis has exposed an overall serious problem in relations between Russia and the West in connection with the US-European strategy for a global security system based on the idea of an expanding West (EU and NATO). Reflecting on the coming Russia, Ivan Ilyin writes in his publication Against Russia: “M. V. Lomonosov and A. S. Pushkin was the first to understand the originality of Russia, its peculiarity from Europe, its "non-Europeanness". F. M. Dostoevsky and N. Ya. Danilevsky was the first to understand that Europe does not know us, does not understand and does not love us. Many years have passed since then, and we must experience and confirm that all the great Russian people were perspicacious and right."
