Friday, March 04, 2011

As New START bill hangs in Senate, Moscow accuses America of violating non-proliferation treaties

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From Russia with Love
For a nation that keeps on accusing other countries of reneging to the commitment of non-proliferation, this has come as a bolt from the blue. Russia has accused the US of reneging to its non-proliferation commitment under mutual nuclear arms diminution treaties and dealing in debarred technologies with Israel and other American allies in infringement of its commitments.

American firms continue to deliver a range of missile-technologies-related supplies and savoir faire technologies to other nations, many of which are not even signatories of the Missile Technology Control Regime, including Israel, Kuwait, Egypt, the UAE, Taiwan, Oman and others, the Russian Foreign Ministry has claimed.

In the same statement, the External Affairs Ministry also put out niceties of infringement by the US. "Questions are raised in Moscow in connection with the American bomb and missile supplies to Israel in the Middle East conflicts. The actions of the US run counter to the basic provisions of the Wassenaar agreements and the OSCE arms supply principles," the Ministry was reported to have told.

Russia indicates that the US industrial security monitoring service in the first six months of 2008 alone identified close to 75 illicit export supplies of military and dual-use items and expertise. Ironically, much to the chagrin of the Americans, these were supplied to countries, including China, Iran, Syria and Libya which have been also included in Washington's so-called blacklist for decades.

The incident also indicated to the non-observance of bilateral arms cut treaties by the US, putting across apprehensions over non-fulfilment of provisions of the 1991 START-1 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. "Russia has more than once expressed its concerns in connection with the unsanctioned re-equipping of five ICBM launch facilities for intercontinental ballistic missiles at a testing ground at the Vandenberg with interceptor missiles, something that goes against the terms of the treaty," the Foreign Ministry said.

US had indeed converted a few nuclear missile launchers into interceptor missile launchers; retrofitted B1 heavy nuclear-capable bombers to transfer standard weapons; and declined to make available telemetric data on Trident-2 submarine missile launches by arguing the missiles belonged to the UK. Also, for example, the US facilitated Israel in building the Shavit three-stage solid fuel missile and has been developing mutually with Israel the Arrow-2 missile interceptor. And if that was not enough, sources claim that US has technically also gone against the Biological Weapons Convention by working on new germ agents and turning down to impart information on a system of its military bio-centres in Indonesia, Thailand, Peru and Egypt. These revelations have come on the heels of a similar, but less damning, report published by the US that claimed that Russia was violating the norms of START-1 regime. And since the violations on the America's part vastly outnumbers that of Russia's both in numbers and in magnitude, the issue is bound to bring embarrassment for the regime,' said Sergei A. Karaganov, a foreign relations expert based in Moscow, while talking to TSI.

The Senate is taking into consideration endorsement of a fresh nuclear weapons treaty, called New START, signed in April by President Barack Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia. Its endorsement necessitates sanction by two-thirds of the Senate, which means at least eight Republican votes. Republicans are busy debating the nuances of the deal and are hell-bent on not allowing Obama any political victory before the Congressional elections.

On the other hand, the New START treaty has broad-based backing from diplomats and high-ranking officials who have served in different administrations. Nonpartisan supporters of this treaty include almost every past and current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former Secretaries of State George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, James Baker, and Colin Powell, and current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It's supported by former Secretaries of Defence James Schlesinger, Frank Carlucci and William Cohen and Current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates.

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