Things seem to be getting a bit serious ...., page-3

It certainly is getting serious Dub. And Trump's appointee John Bolton is in the thick of it.

Washington’s ultimatum on INF treaty heightens threat of nuclear war

By Bill Van Auken
6 December 2018

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a blunt ultimatum to Moscow Tuesday, vowing that the US will unilaterally abrogate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, one of the last remaining arms control agreements from the Cold War, within 60 days unless Russia submits to what Washington defines as compliance with the pact. The move represents a major escalation of the threat of global nuclear war.

The 60-day period was a concession of sorts to the European powers and in particular Germany, whose Chancellor Angela Merkel pressed US President Donald Trump at the recent G20 summit in Buenos Aires not to follow through with plans to summarily upend the INF Treaty.

Signed in 1987 by the US and the former Soviet Union, the accord banned both nuclear and nonnuclear land-based missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometers (about 310 to 3,400 miles).
Accepted by Moscow under the leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet president, who was embarked upon a program of capitalist restoration, the treaty represented a strategic concession to the United States, which far outstripped the Soviet Union in airborne and sea-launched missiles.

A secret memo drafted by Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton and obtained by the Washington Post instructed the US secretary of state to “make all necessary arrangements” to withdraw from the treaty “no later than December 4, 2018,” and the US defense secretary to “develop and deploy ground-launched missiles at the earliest possible date.”

While Washington succeeded in pressuring NATO into supporting its ultimatum to Russia, there is deep disquiet in Europe over the scrapping of the agreement, which poses the return of US short and medium-range missiles to the continent and the redoubled threat that it will become a principal battlefield in any nuclear exchange between the US and Russia. The deployment of US Pershing II missiles in Germany in the 1980s triggered mass popular protests against the threat of war.
According to the Washington Post, Merkel and other European officials told Trump that an immediate withdrawal from the treaty would “not give them enough time to explain the policy change to domestic audiences.”

“European leaders fear that their voters could be sympathetic to a Kremlin argument that the United States is tearing up one international agreement after another, after Trump’s decision to leave the Paris climate agreement and the Iran nuclear deal,” the Post reported.

In other words, European leaders fear that their populations will see the move for what it is, a ratcheting up of US imperialist aggression, and popular antiwar sentiment will become fused with already escalating class tensions like the ones that have played out in clashes across France in recent weeks.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/12/06/inft-d06.html