Stratcom Gen. James Cartwright: Don't renew START-1 Treaty

[Psyop Samurai]

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Cartwright made his big announcement on Tuesday in a Senate hearing on his candidacy for Vice Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cartwright told the senators that refusing to extend the treaty will bring the U.S. more good than harm. He said that it would give the U.S. greater flexibility to realize “global strike solutions.”

The U.S. first spoke of global strike solutions in 2001. The concept is marked by the possibility of hitting enemy targets from any point on Earth. Ideally, the interval between identifying the object and destroying it should be only several minutes. In the American military's design, the target of the “global strike” may be a pariah state that is suspected of developing weapons of mass destruction. The Pentagon sees the global strike as an important element in the war against terrorism.

Cartwright said that several proposals for the global strike from different branches of the military are being considered. Thus the Pentagon is developing supersonic cruise missiles and improving its orbital groups of military satellites. A number of American experts are suggesting less costly methods. One of them is to include Trident ballistic missiles equipped with non-nuclear warheads on submarines in the global strike.

This is where the problem arises. Trident missiles are strategic and they fall under the START-1 treaty, which means that there cannot be more than a set number of them. For the nuclear containment of two superpowers, the number of missiles mentioned in the treaty is fully sufficient. But the global strike concept envisages them equipped with non-nuclear warheads. In those conditions, a much larger number of missile will be needed to deliver a strike comparable with a nuclear attack. That logic, it seems, led Cartwright to declare that Washington needs to refuse to renew START-1.

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http://www.kommersant.com/p791826/arms_reduction/

Can I get me some of that "global strike"? Say Hallelujah!!