Four decades ago, the United States deployed cruise and Pershing II nuclear missiles in Europe to counter Soviet SS-20s — a move that stoked Cold War tensions but led within years to a historic disarmament deal.
"We can be proud of planting this sapling, which may one day grow into a mighty tree of peace," Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev told US president Ronald Reagan in December 1987 as they agreed to dismantle the rival systems under a treaty that scrapped all ground-based shorter-range and intermediate-range (INF) nuclear and conventional weapons with ranges between 500km and 5,500km.
The sapling survived until 2019 when Donald Trump, then US president, quit the treaty, citing alleged violations that Russia denied. But the risky implications of the pact's full unravelling are becoming fully apparent only now, as both sides set out their plans for new deployments.
On June 28, President Vladimir Putin said Russia would resume producing short and intermediate-range land-based missiles and decide where to place them if needed.
On July 10, the US said it would start deploying in Germany from 2026 weapons that will include SM-6s and Tomahawks, previously placed mainly on ships, and new hypersonic missiles.
These are conventional systems but some could also, in theory, be fitted with nuclear tips, and security experts said Russian planning would have to allow for that possibility.
The decisions, taken against the background of acute tensions over Russia's war in Ukraine and what the West sees as threatening nuclear rhetoric from Putin, add to an already complex array of threats for both sides. They also form part of a wider INF arms race with China.
"The reality is that both Russia and the US are taking steps that they believe enhance their security, regardless of whether it comes at the expense of the other," said Jon Wolfsthal, director of global risk at the Federation of American Scientists.
"And as a result, every move that the US or Russia makes puts pressure on the adversary to respond in some way, politically or militarily. That's the definition of an arms race," Wolfsthal, a former US arms control official, said.
Andrey Baklitskiy, senior researcher at the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, said the planned deployments created "more scenarios for direct military confrontation between Russia and Nato countries" for which all sides needed to prepare.
Hypothetically, these could include eventualities such as a Russian strike on a Polish base where Western weapons bound for Ukraine were being stored, or a US attack on a Russian radar or a command and control post.
"My only concern about the deployment of these systems is they may not really add to our military capability but they almost certainly add to the risk that a crisis could accelerate and grow out of control," he said.
Ulrich Kuehn, an arms control specialist at the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy in Hamburg, said: "From a Russian perspective, if you deploy these kind of weapons in Europe, they can generate strategic (threat) effects — to Russian command centres, to political centres in Russia, to airfields, airstrips where Russian strategic bombers are placed."
Russia might respond, he said, by deploying more strategic missiles that point at the continental US.
Any deployment of Russian and US intermediate-range missiles could also prompt a further build-up by China, which was not bound by the 1987 Soviet-US treaty and so has been free to ramp up its own INF arsenal.
The US Department of Defence said in a 2023 report to Congress that China's rocket force has 2,300 missiles with ranges between 300km and 3,000km, and a further 500 that can travel between 3,000km and 5,500km.
Concern about China's missiles was an important factor behind Trump's decision to quit the treaty with Russia. The US has already taken an initial step towards placing its own intermediate-range weapons in Asia.
In April it made its first overseas deployment of previously banned ground-launched missiles in a two-week military exercise in the Philippines.
"This will not be a two-party arms race between Russia and the United States and its allies, it will be a much more complex one," Kuehn said, with potential to involve China and other US allies such as South Korea and Japan.
The writer is from Reuters
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times