New Missile Plans for Europe Bring Back Cold War Danger: Experts

“We’ve been down this road before, and it took us decades to get out of it, learning hard lessons about the dangers of ‘intermediate-range’ missile escalation in Europe,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Intelligence Project at the Federation of American Scientists, told Business Insider.

He said the potential for “retaliatory escalation” was a feature of the Cold War and could happen again now.

The United States announced plans last week to station long-range forces in Germany, with an intermittent deployment starting in 2026 and then a permanent presence at an unforeseen time in the future.

“Once fully developed,” Ally said. wrote in the statement“These conventional long-range fire units will include SM-6, Tomahawk and hypersonic weapons in development, which have significantly longer ranges than Europe’s current land-based fires.”

The announcement came a day after several NATO allies moved forward with plans to develop new long-range missiles, with France, Poland, Germany and Italy signing on to plans focused on ground-launched cruise missiles with ranges of more than 500 kilometers.

In either case, the United States and its European partners are responding to serious deficiencies in long-range firepower that have been exposed by the Ukraine war.

The war “demonstrated what many already knew: long-range offensive weapons are extremely useful in fighting wars,” Fabian Hofmann, a postdoctoral researcher at the Oslo Nuclear Project at the University of Oslo, wrote in the paper. War on the Rocks Commentary.

“The ability to engage targets at operational and strategic depth can decisively enable the conduct of offensive and defensive operations and set the conditions for victory on the battlefield,” he explained.

The new plans come after years of heightened tensions between the West and Russia over a range of issues, including long-range artillery fire, after the U.S. withdrew from the INF Treaty in 2019, with Russia accusing Moscow of violations. Russia denied the allegations and later withdrew from the treaty as well, paving the way for both countries to develop and deploy new ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles.

In response to the U.S. and German plans, as well as other NATO actions, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: Said“This is a very serious threat to our national security.”

“All of this requires that we have a thoughtful, coordinated and effective response to deter NATO and counter NATO,” he said.

Experts say Russia’s violations of the INF Treaty have snowballed. “I’ve said for a long time that the Russians are going to regret Putin’s violation of the 1987 INF Treaty, which he opened the door to Germany and other countries to field large numbers of highly accurate, long-range conventional missiles,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey and an expert on nuclear proliferation. I wrote to X.

Although Russia initiated this, the planned deployment to Europe certainly seems like an escalation and will likely prompt Russia to deploy more of its own long-range weapons, Christensen explained.

“There is an element of autopilot in this dynamic, as each side uses the other’s actions to justify further steps to build up military might,” he said, adding that the East and West appeared to be back on a trajectory of “retaliatory responses”.

Christensen’s views echoed the concerns of other experts and officials about recent developments.

John B. Wolfsthal, an expert on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation and a national security adviser in the Obama administration, Post to X “We are recreating one of the most dangerous elements of the Cold War in Europe, and it’s only going to get worse.”

Conventional long-range strike capabilities, ranging from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, provide a powerful ability to strike deep into enemy territory with little or no notice. The intention to field new capabilities may be a deterrent, but rather it could ignite an arms race.

Christensen said the only saving grace of the U.S.-Germany agreement is that it is non-nuclear.

But he added, “conventional missiles, especially fast-flying ballistic missiles, have their own problems: they reduce the time leaders have to react and increase the risk of overreaction and error. This leads to worst-case planning and undermines crisis stability. And superior conventional capabilities can lead an opponent to rely more on nuclear weapons to compensate.”