By John LaForge
Ukraine, the United States, and NATO have condemned what they correctly called Russian President Putin’s “dangerous and irresponsible” transfer of nuclear weapons to neighboring Belarus.
On June 9, Putin announced that Moscow would deploy its nuclear weapons in Belarus, reporting that work on new facilities for housing the weapons would be complete by July 7-8.
Putin had said on March 25 that Belarusian “President Alexander Lukashenko’s right: He says we’re your closest allies. Why do the Americans deploy their nuclear weapons to their allies, on their territory, train the crews, and pilots how to use this type of weapon if needed? We agreed that we will do the same.”
Indeed, the United States has transferred more than 100 of its 50- and 170-kiloton nuclear gravity bombs known as B61s to bases in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey, where allied pilots rehearse nuclear weapons attacks using their allied fighter jets. Case in point, NATO’s “Air Defender 2023,” a nine-day German-led, international war game involving 24 countries live-flying all across Germany, began on Monday June 12, in the midst of the hot war in Ukraine.
Point of information: The Associated Press keeps calling these nuclear weapons “tactical,” and less destructive than “city-busting” “strategic” devices. So it must be recalled that the city-busting Hiroshima bomb was a 15-kiloton weapon far less destructive than today’s B61 “tactical” hydrogen bombs.
Now Putin and Lukashenko copy the U.S. practice of violating the terms of the 1970 Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in the same way that the United States has for decades. All such nuclear “sharing” constitutes not just a violation of the NPT’s Articles I, II and VI, but a hair-raising and unnecessary escalation of the quagmire powder keg in Ukraine.
Last May 15, ICAN, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, confronted the increasingly globalized war in Ukraine by sending a set of four demands to the G7 — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the U.K. and the U.S., all of which are actively arming Ukraine — noting that every one of the them employ nuclear weapons “either as nuclear-armed states or as host or umbrella states.” ICAN’s four demands included a clear denunciation of nuclear sharing, as practiced by the U.S. and NATO, noting:
“Following Russia announcing plans to place nuclear weapons in Belarus, the G7 leaders must agree to end all nuclear-armed states stationing their weapons in other countries and engage Russia to cancel its plans to do so. Several G7 members are currently involved in nuclear sharing arrangements of their own, and can demonstrate their opposition to Russia’s recent deployment announcement by commencing negotiations of new Standing of Forces Agreements between the U.S. and Germany and the U.S. and Italy, to remove the weapons currently stationed in those countries.”
This important call for an end to the stationing of U.S. nuclear weapons in other countries, and its direct reference to the U.S. and its allies, helps contextualize Russia’s escalation. The only practically workable way to move Putin to reverse his deployment to Belarus, is to offer to reverse the Pentagon’s deployment.
Call it a Cuban Missile Crisis Redux. That terrible confrontation was resolved when President Kennedy offered to, and then did, withdraw U.S. nuclear-armed missiles from Turkey. De-escalation works, and it can lead to further breakthroughs.
— BBC Mar 26, 2023
— A version of this opinion was syndicated by PeaceVoice.org
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