Just pointing out that you completely mischaracterized the factors at play to produce your hypothetical. Now you are arguing for effect.
Ah, I get it - you are semantically objecting to the word "seceded". Oh dear.
Fine, amend my statement to say "mutually agreed with the RoUSA to split". Since I was in fact ALWAYS arguing about the effect, your objection doesn't alter anything whatsoever.
Do you sincerely believe the "RoUSA" would have continued to rely on the "People's Republic of California" for vital parts of its deterrent? At the very latest once the latter made noises about wanting to enter a military alliance with the main strategic competitor, the "RoUSA" would have been scrambling to rectify the situation!
The Russians made a choice. And there were other choices they could have made (see below) for mitigating that original choice.
Sure, and I'm not here to defend those choices (many of which were *deeply* misguided). But they are water under the bridge now, and they DO cause the effects we see. The US also made choices, and not a few of them were similarly ill-advised - only nobody seems ready to admit it, and that's a shame, because it means the lessons from these mistakes will not be learned. And it begets an attitude that, to anyone who knows otherwise, severely damages the credibility of certain US policies.
The evidence for the hull life of the Ohio class. The evidence for the lifespan, maintainability and supplier base of MMIII esp. wrt
the number of glory trips required per year. All public domain. No such evidence is available for the Russian systems.
This is getting ridiculous. I suppose 15 years of neglect and poor maintenance will not have affected the hull life of the Russian boats at all? And MMIII is a bizarre case anyway - with the extent of re-manufacturing that has gone into them over the years they aren't even the same missiles that were originally deployed to a significant extent. In any case, kindly complain to France about SNLE-3G and the hull life of the Triomphant class.
The certified shelf-lives of Russian ICBMs are well publicized BTW, pretty much every time they test launch a random sample for service life extension purposes they announce the newly approved limit.
Whether you keep a submarine going for 50 years or only 30 (which is probably what it was originally designed for, anyway) and keep missiles operational by replacing basically every nut, bolt and filament is arguably also a choice. I don't see under what obligation the Russians would have to justify a different strategy to anyone, so long as it doesn't bust New START (which it doesn't).
The Russians were offered NATO membership. They declined. So they and Ukraine could have been part of another alliance all over again.
Seriously? Things NEVER got anywhere near a formal offer for Russia to decline - EVER.
The closest it came was a mid-1990s British draft proposal (which likely never progressed beyond UK internal discussions) that would have created a special type of "membership" specifically for Russia. If you look at the details, it becomes apparent that this status was carefully crafted to exclude basically all the privileges that define a bonafide NATO member, so it would practically have been merely the NATO-Russia Council by another name.
The Russians cheated. They got caught cheating through a massive clandestine effort that was not part of the treaty.
So-called national technical means of verification (such as reconnaissance satellites) are at least implicitly taken to be part of the verification regimes in most treaties - that explicitly includes ABM.
They then stopped cheating in that manner. And moved on to other cheating see Krasnoyarsk.
See, now that's one of those examples where I'd be careful about accusations of "cheating" or "violations".
Krasnoyarsk is arguably best characterized as a treaty dispute or controversy (if you argue semantics, so will I). Cheating supposes you know that your action is in breach of the treaty and hope the other side doesn't notice - neither is likely the case with the EW site in Krasnoyarsk. There could be no expectation that a massive bi-static radar site would evade detection by the US, so it's probable the Soviets believed they were in compliance due to a misinterpretation of the treaty on their part. The US objected, discussions ensued, the USSR abandoned construction. Fair enough, right?
And of course the ABM treaty compliance body was incapable of applying sanctions. So why not continue to cheat?
Did they? No, the issues were remedied, so apparently things worked as they should.
Go ahead and bring them out.
If you class Krasnoyarsk as a "violation" rather than a "controversy" so are the upgrades to Fylingdales and Thule - certainly the Soviets thought so. What makes one party's concerns more important than another's?
That SAM-D (Patriot) was strictly limited in engagement velocities was the best example of the US scrupulously
abiding by the treaty to a ludicrous degree.
So?
So no violation is ever likely produce a breach. And none of the treaty compliance bodies can apply or enforce sanctions.
And the inspection protocols are deliberately designed *not* to find violations: inspectors can be held at a distance of 50 meters.
The high-fidelity SCUD TEL decoys the Iraqis cobbled together by 1991 could not be distinguished from the real thing from
a signature perspective until you were under 22 meters.
Would you please stop talking in code? I don't understand any of what you are saying there, starting with which treaty you are even referring to. And, sources please.
The late 80's system had a defended area of many thousands of square miles.
The Moscow metropolitan area is "many thousands of square miles" in extent (about 10 thousand square miles, to be concrete). Thousands of square miles does not in fact mean what you appear to think it does.
The defensive complexes were 50 miles away from Moscow itself.
From the city centre, yes - not from the city limit (and the vast majority are a lot closer). Do you propose they put missile silos in people's front gardens? Again, Moscow is a BIG place!
At its upper bound, they could have defended a good chunk of European Russia.
Quite how that was supposed to work with missiles which we *know* are not all that much more capable than Spartan/Sprint requires some explanation, I'm afraid.
Short-range endo: makes complete sense given the general de-MIRVing of the US arsenal under START+. Just wait for atmospheric strip-out of the decoys.
Which is probably the rationale for doing so. However: the number of short-range missiles was not increased to compensate - there are now fewer missiles than before. So much for "vast" and defending a good part of the more than one *million* square miles of European Russia.
Aegis Ashore has no utility against strategic weapons.
So? They'd unequivocally violate ABM regardless.
And the radars meet no plausible definition under the ABM treaty.
Which is precisely the problem, is it not?
GMD is not credible against a Russian threat of practically any size. They know that.
Hence statements such as Putin's - the problem is that it isn't actually "not" but "not YET". And they know THAT, too.
I'm not. There are too many direct quotes from period. Particularly what Putin said on Russian national television.
Ah. So I'm supposed to just take your word for it. I do research these things before posting, you know.
www.thedrive.com
www.businessinsider.com
foreignpolicy.com
www.scmp.com
www.defensenews.com
thebulletin.org
