Foreign affairs 2019 09-10

The Return of Doomsday

September/October 2019 153

straint, transparency, and predictability for each side’s conventional

and nuclear forces. In their absence, Russia and the West are assuming

and planning for worst-case scenarios. The 
rst crack appeared in 2002,

when the United States withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (‚ƒ„)

Treaty, signed three decades earlier to prevent Washington and Mos-

cow from deploying nationwide defenses against long-range ballistic

missiles. Five years later, Russia e‡ectively suspended another land-

mark agreement, the 1990 Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in

Europe, and Œ‚Ž‘ followed suit.

The 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (•Œ–) Treaty—which

banned an entire class o˜ destabilizing nuclear-capable missiles on Eu-

ropean territory—has been dealt a likely fatal blow with this year’s deci-

sions by Washington to withdraw from the treaty and by Moscow to

suspend implementation o˜ it. This followed U.S. concerns about Rus-

sian deployment o˜ prohibited missiles and Russian allegations raised

in response. The fate o˜ the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is

also in doubt, with four Republican U.S. senators writing to President

Donald Trump this past spring asking iœ he would consider “unsigning”

the treaty. The future o˜ the 2010 New ¡Ž‚¢Ž treaty is also unclear. Un-

less both sides agree to extend it—a proposition Trump and his admin-

istration have consistently refused to embrace—the treaty will expire in

2021. In short, in less than two years, the last remaining agreement to

Russian roulette: a Russian ICBM launcher in Moscow, April 2017

MAKSIM

BLINOV

/ SPUTNIK

/ AP

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