News Analysis: The return of the Euromissiles?

If you believe the speeches, the Cold War has broken out again

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By Pekka Hakala
     
      Finland, adhering strictly to its policy of neutrality and non-alignment, naturally managed to stay outside of the superpower spats and conflicts of the 1980s, but what else do you remember of the Cold War rhetoric of those days?
      For me, the only thing that sticks in the mind is the graffiti on the wall of the men's room of the Old Student House bar in Helsinki.
      "Oi! Peaceniks! Don't you know that the Soviets have nukes, too?" asked the writer, who - fired up with political zeal - had driven his ballpoint-pen message deep into the melamine wall of the cubicle.
      Underneath it, the neat small hand of a less impassioned correspondent had written: "Really? But do they work?"
     
The hottest political discussion topic in the Europe of the 1980s was the medium-range ballistic missiles that were deployed in Germany and elsewhere.
      The countless negotiations and demonstrations concerning these weapons began in the late 1970s when NATO and the United States became aware of the Soviet Union's new RSD-10 "Pioneer" medium range missile, known in NATO parlance as the SS-20.
      The United States responded to the perceived threat to NATO tactical nuclear forces from the SS-20 by producing a similar missile, the Pershing II. Deployment of Pershings began in West Germany in 1983, together with a ground-launched variant of the Tomahawk cruise missile, which was stationed there and in the UK and other NATO countries.
      The concept of "Euromissiles" was born, and it brought the peace activists out into the streets in force, fearing greater instability in Europe amidst suggestions that the weapons could be used to "win" a tactical nuclear exchange.
     
Washington's intention was to play its own missile card to up the ante and force the Soviet Union to sit down at the negotiating table.
      Ronald Reagan's gambit only bore fruit when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
      The INF Treaty (for Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces), signed in Washington D.C. in December 1987, eliminated ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometres, whether equipped with nuclear or conventional warheads.
      INF did not and does not say anything about anti-ballistic missile defence systems.
     
Over the next three years from June 1988, a total of just over 2,690 such missiles were destroyed, with the lion's share or around 1,800 belonging to the Soviet side.
      The last were dismantled in 1991, and the treaty remained in effect to bind the heirs of the Soviet Union after the Communist regime collapsed.
      "The INF Treaty was a definite milestone in the winding down of the Cold War", declares Stefan Forss, a researcher at the National Defence University's Department of Strategic and Defence Studies.
     
Hardly any wonder, then, that European politicians were gob-smacked on February 7th to hear the words of the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov, delivered in the Duma, the lower house of Russia's Parliament.
      Ivanov commented that the Russian leadership of the past had been guilty of a number of serious errors of judgement that weakened the country's defence capability.
      "The gravest mistake", in his view, was to resolve on the destruction of an entire class of weapons, medium-range ballistic missiles, which are now in the hands of a host of other countries.
      "Only Russia and the United States do not have the right to have such weapons, although they would be quite useful for us", the minister declared, later calling the INF Treaty "a relic of the Cold War".
     
On Thursday of last week, General Yuri Baluyevsky, the Chief of the Russian General Staff since 2004, came out and repeated the message to Russian news agencies.
      He argued that a possible unilateral withdrawal from INF could be justified by the United States' declared intention to deploy components of missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.
      President Vladimir Putin has himself expressed his own displeasure at the idea of these same missile defence systems, delivering a withering speech at a recent security forum in Munich.
      The US explanations, that the defences are primarily directed against a future threat to Europe from missiles possibly lobbed by a nuclear Iran, was laughed out of court in Moscow.
      Stefan Forss is not laughing at the idea at all.
     
"If you take a globe and a piece of string, you will see that the shortest way from Iran to the eastern seaboard of the United States goes through Central Europe", Forss notes.
      In his view, the stationing of a few dozen missiles in Poland does not have a great deal of relevance in the face of a Russian arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads.
      On the other hand, the Russians are absolutely correct in their complaint: thanks to the 20-year-old INF Treaty, neither Russia nor the U.S. have medium-range missiles, while many others do.
      For example an emergent China, whom Putin discreetly refrained from mentioning by name in his Munich speech, though he did refer to North and South Korea, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Israel.
      Last Friday, the Financial Times columnist Quentin Peel surmised that Russia has a deal in mind.
      In Peel's view, Moscow would actually like to get under the Western missile umbrella in some shape or form, but what with Washington being too busy on the Iraq and Afghanistan fronts, the message had to be delivered in a loud shout.
     
Stefan Forss, on the other hand, has a theory that sounds slightly more like a return to the Cold War days: in opposing the missile shield so vehemently, Russia is driving a wedge between the NATO allies in the safe knowledge that this time the Pershings won't be coming, and even if they were, nobody would house them.
      "It will be interesting to see how the NATO countries react", says Forss. "America can put its allies to a kind of loyalty test. If they [the European NATO members] are immediately down on their knees in front of Moscow, then Russia can regard it as a considerable triumph."
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 17.2.2007


Links:
  RIA Novosti: Scrapping medium-range ballistic missiles a mistake - Ivanov
  St. Petersburg Times: Russia may exit arms treaty
  Financial Times: Russia´s arms protests raise cold war echoes
  Ground Launched Cruise Missile - GLCM (Wikipedia)
  Pershing II (Wikipedia)
  INF Treaty (Wikipedia)

PEKKA HAKALA / Helsingin Sanomat
pekka.hakala@hs.fi