Paul
Goble
Staunton, July 17 – The approaching
end of the arms control agreements reached between Washington and Moscow and
American plans to include Beijing in talks about replacing the current arrangements
with an all-embracing arms control accord is viewed in Moscow as demeaning to
Russia, Aleksandr Golts says.
In Yezhednevny zhurnal, the
independent Moscow military analyst says that for Moscow, the existence of bilateral
arms control agreements with the US was psychologically important for the
Moscow leadership because these accords gave Russia a special status. By ending
that regime, Washington has deprived Moscow of that (ej.ru/?a=note&id=33970).
But the American decision to move in
this direction has even more fateful long-term consequences, Golts
continues. China is not prepared to
enter such talks and so that will mean that Russia almost certainly will have
to enter a brave new world in which it will have to engage in a new arms race
qualitatively and quantitatively with the United States.
It isn’t ready for that. Not only is
its economy much smaller and in worse shape, he points out; its
military-industry is in disastrous shape burdened by enormous debts with
officials now talking about the needs for billions and billions of rubles just
to pay for what supposedly had already been produced and delivered.
Thus, Golts says, “the Russian
system of military production has shown itself to be extremely … ineffective in
a situation where the real arms race has still not begun in earnest.” That
leads to the question: “What then will be the case with the economy of the country
when Russia has to compete with the US not only qualitatively but quantitatively
as well?”
The treaties which had kept that
requirement in check are coming to an end, and Moscow will have no choice but
to try to compete. The last time it did so,
three decades ago, “a simiar race destroyed a country by the name of the USSR.”
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