United States to announce withdrawal from nuclear treaty with Russia

The government of Donald Trump is ready to announce this Friday that will withdraw from a crucial treaty on the control of superpower weapons since the cold war and the disappearance of which fears a new arms race.

The withdrawal of the United States, expected months ago, would come after years of an unresolved dispute over the respect of the pact by Russia, known as the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, signed in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev.

This was the first gun control measure to ban an entire clbad of weapons: cruise missiles launched from the ground, whose range is between 500 km and 5 500 km. Moscow denies having broken it.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in early December that Washington would give the Kremlin 60 days to return to fill it an official notice of withdrawal, which would take place six months later. The 60 day deadline expires Saturday and the Trump administration is expected to announce Friday that efforts to reach a compliance agreement have failed and will in turn stop.

The State Department has indicated that Pompeo would make a public statement on Friday morning, but he did not indicate the subject.

In a tweet on Thursday, NATO's main spokeswoman, Oana Lungescu, said there was nothing to indicate that a compliance agreement with Russia was being reached. "We must therefore prepare for a world without a treaty"he wrote.