AP reports: “U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton faces two days of high-tension talks in Moscow beginning Monday after President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from a landmark nuclear weapons treaty.

“Trump’s announcement that the United States would leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, or INF, treaty brought sharp criticism on Sunday from Russian officials and from former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who signed the treaty in 1987 with President Ronald Reagan.”

ALICE SLATER,  alicejslater at gmail.com
Slater is the New York Director of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, and serves on the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War. She wrote the piece “The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons Is Honored With a Nobel Peace Prize” for The Nation.

She just wrote: “Now is an opportunity to take a time-out on nuclear gamesmanship, new threats, trillions of wasted dollars … on weapons systems that Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev acknowledged, back in 1987 at the end of the Cold War, could never be used, warning that ‘A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.’

“Now in 2018, more than 30 years later, when 69 nations have signed the treaty to ban the bomb and 19 of the 50 nations required to ratify the treaty for it to enter into force have put it through their legislatures. The United States and Russia are in an unholy struggle to keep the nuclear arms race going with the U.S. accusing Russia of violating the Intermediate Nuclear Force treaty which eliminated a whole class of land-based conventional and nuclear missiles in Europe, and Russia planning new weapons systems in response to a whole stream of U.S. bad faith actions, the most egregious of which was President Bush walking out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty negotiated with the Soviet Union to ratchet down the nuclear arms race.

“An honest appraisal of the bad actors in this frightening scenario for the destruction of all life on earth, must conclude that the U.S. has been the constant provocateur in the relationship. …”