USA resumed missile race | He tried a …

Less than a month after the death of the FNI disarmament treaty, the missile race has already resumed: the United States has announced that it has successfully completed its first conventional missile test since the Cold War.

The tests were held Sunday at 2:30 pm on the island of San Nicolas, off the coast of California, in the west of the country, the Pentagon announced in a statement.

"The missile tested abandoned its launch pad on the ground and reached its target accurately after more than 500 km of flight," he added.

"The data collected and the lessons learned from this test will provide the Ministry of Defense with the information needed to develop new medium-range weapons," the Pentagon concluded.

The missile tested is "a variant of the Tomahawk attack cruise missile," said a Defense Ministry official. Images published by the armed forces show the projectile taking off from a Mark 41 vertical launch system.

The United States on August 2 abandoned the INF (acronym for "intermediate-range forces"), signed in 1987 by US and Soviet leaders of the time, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, aimed at prohibit the use of medium-range (500 to 5,000 km), conventional and nuclear missiles.

Washington justified its decision on the grounds that Moscow had been violating the treaty for years. The US exit paves the way for a new arms race against Russia and, above all, China.

On August 2, Defense Secretary Mark Esper announced that the United States would accelerate the development of new ground-to-air missiles. Esper then said that the Americans had opened investigations on these missile systems in 2017, even though they remained within the limits of the INF Treaty.

But for Russian MP Yuri Shvitkin, vice chairman of the Duma Defense Committee, the lower house of the Russian parliament, "the tests of this missile once again confirm that the United States has violated the INF agreement. . " "They were planning their unilateral exit in advance," said a parliamentarian at the Russian agency Ria-Novosti. The INF Treaty allowed in the 1980s the elimination of Russian SS20 and US missiles, American missiles Pershing, at the heart of the euro missile crisis.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the United States of ending the treaty during his visit to France. "It is not Russia that has unilaterally withdrawn from the treaty," he said at a press conference with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron. "The renewal of the START III treaty is currently under study, and our partners in the US are not taking any initiative at this time, although we have already submitted our proposals," Putin said.

The latest version of the START treaty, which keeps the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia far below the level reached during the Cold War, ends in 2021.

Putin said Moscow would not deploy medium and short range nuclear weapons "until US systems are deployed."