US to ring China with missiles in nuclear arms race

Andre Damon

Within hours of the official withdrawal by the United States on Friday from the world’s most important nuclear treaty, the Pentagon made clear that it intends to ring China with missiles amid a rapidly accelerating nuclear arms race.

A Titan II nuclear missile [credit: US Department of Defense]

Speaking to reporters during a trip to Australia, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said the Pentagon would deploy missiles prohibited under the treaty “sooner rather than later.”

“I would prefer months,” Esper said.

The deployment of medium-range missiles in the Pacific would turn the Chinese coast and the Pacific islands surrounding it into a nuclear battlefront, putting the lives of billions of people in China, the Koreas, Japan, Taiwan and the broader region at risk.

The INF treaty, which was signed between then President Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, banned the US and Russia from developing missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,000 kilometers, meaning that most of Europe and much of the Pacific were off limits to the stationing of nuclear missiles.

President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in the East Room of the White House, Dec. 8, 1987 [credit: White House]

However, as technological trends shifted military balances and the United States escalated its conflict with China, Washington increasingly came to view the Cold War-era treaty as conflicting with its aims of militarily encircling Beijing, which was not a signatory.

With the potential deployment of US nuclear missiles just minutes in flight-time from the Chinese mainland, tensions will be on a hair trigger, with the huge population of the region living under the specter of nuclear annihilation.

Responding to the US withdrawal from the INF treaty, UN Secretary-General António Guterres warned that “the world will lose an invaluable brake on nuclear war.”

Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, said that Trump is “pursuing a strategy that will create the conditions for a dangerous arms race.” The Financial Times warned, along the same lines, of Trump’s “rekindling of the nuclear arms race.”

In defending his decision to station missiles in a densely populated area thousands of miles away from America, Esper accused China of “weaponizing the global commons using predatory economics.”

In other words, China, by carrying out peaceful economic activities, is threatening the United States, and that should therefore be countered with the threat of military annihilation.

“We firmly believe no one nation can or should dominate the Indo-Pacific,” said Esper, a man who represents a country that once “scorched and boiled and baked to death” (in the words of Air Force General Curtis Lemay) hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians in its war to conquer the Pacific.