Green Party MEP, Catherine Rowett condemned the USA’s decision to formally withdraw from a key nuclear treaty with Russia today.
She said: “I am dismayed by this reprehensible act on the part of the Trump administration. It is an absolute tragedy that the goal of nuclear disarmament has been so massively set back.”
The announcement that the US is to pull out of Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), which was signed by US President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, has sparked fears of a new arms race and a new ‘Cold War’.
The INF banned missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km (310-3,400 miles), although the USA claimed that Russia had consistently violated the treaty, with Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, stating last week that “Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise”.
Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said: “This is serious … The INF treaty has been a cornerstone in arms control for decades, and now we see the demise of the treaty.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres too claimed that “an invaluable brake on nuclear war” was being lost.”
Green Party MEP for the East of England, Catherine Rowett, who sits on the EU’s Russia delegation, said:
“Having lived through the end of the Cold War, with the very real spectre of mutually assured destruction, I had hoped that world leaders could come together to rid the world of these awful weapons, but sadly this has not been the case and the rhetoric and actions on both sides is deeply worrying.”
“I look forward to a day when all nations, including Britain, but most importantly the USA and Russia, decommission their nuclear arsenals so that our world is made safer from indiscriminate destruction. Unfortunately today’s decision is a massive step backwards and away from something that surely everyone wants to see, namely world peace”.
She continued:
“I would urge the USA to urgently reconsider their decision. A nuclear arms race and a new Cold War would benefit no-one except the manufacturers of weapons. “The vast majority of countries back nuclear non-proliferation and the awarding of a Nobel Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons shows how much respect the movement for peace has worldwide, a respect that the USA should consider in its own actions.”