The United States and Russia announced today that they had finalized the long awaited nuclear arms reduction treaty, and that the pact will be signed on April 8 in Prague. The pact will cut warhead stockpiles by about 30 percent on both sides.
The ratification of the treaty will require a two-thirds majority vote in the Senate, but support has been largely assured as the final version of the pact places no formal limits on US missile defense.
The work-around for missile defense, as reported earlier this week, involved allowing both sides to issue signing statements outside of the main text of the deal expressing their opinions on the issue of defensive missiles.
But the missile defense issue is far from dead, even if it will no longer stand in the way of this pact. US plans to put interceptor missiles in Romania and, perhaps more significantly, in Poland just 50 miles from the border with Kaliningrad, will remain an issue moving forward, as will Russia’s efforts to counter such deployments.
Regarding the new missiles on ships in the Black Sea in Bulgaria and on land in Romania and Poland with radar/command center in the Czech Republic former Trident missile engineer Bob Aldridge-http://www.plrc.org- commented, "Whether on ships or land, they are still a necessary component for an unanswerable first strike". The title of his main work says it all: First Strike! The Pentagon´s Strategy For Nuclear War. MAD isn´t enough for the bloody fools in the Pentagon, they go for NUTS (Nuclear Use Target Selection). If you only go for MAD, you don´t need to be able to hit within 30 meters (or less) of the target, as do Minuteman-3 and Trident-2. That´s inviting suicide by mistake and for that reason Bob Aldridge resigned.
What is needed is for the general public and politicians to understand that Nuclear Primacy, also known as a disarming and unanswerable first-strike capability is suicidal because the logical answer is Launch On Warning.