Washington has signed more than $1 billion in new missile
contracts in the three months since it announced plans to withdraw from a key
Cold War-era arms treaty, campaigners said Thursday, according to AFP.
"The withdrawal from the INF Treaty has fired the
starting pistol on a new Cold War," warned Beatrice Fihn, who heads the
Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
(ICAN).
US President Donald Trump announced last October that his
country would leave the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) agreement
concluded between the US and the former Soviet Union in 1987.
Washington, which accused Russia of violating the treaty
through a new missile system, began the official process of withdrawing from
the pact in February.
Russian President Vladimir Putin responded by saying Moscow
would also leave the INF treaty, which is considered the cornerstone of global
arms control.
In the three months following the October announcement, the
US government "proceeded to arrange no less than $1 billion in new missile
contracts", according to a report by ICAN and another anti-nuclear
campaign group, PAX.
The report detailed over $1.1 billion in new contracts with
six mainly US companies.
US defense contractor Raytheon saw the biggest windfall,
tallying 44 new contracts worth some $537 million.
Lockheed Martin meanwhile scooped up 36 new contracts, worth
$268 million, while Boeing grabbed four new contracts totaling $245 million,
the report found.
'Congress should investigate'
"Congress should investigate the lobbying roles of
Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon who took the lion's share of these contracts,"
Fihn said in a statement.
The report authors acknowledged that it was unclear if all
of the new contracts awarded between October 22, 2018 and January 21, 2019 were
for new nuclear weapon production.
"What is clear is that there is a new rush towards
building more missiles that benefit a handful of US companies and intend to
flood the market with missiles regardless of their range," they said.
At a global level, the report found that governments are
currently contracting at least $116 billion (102 billion euros) to private
companies in France, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Britain and the US for the
production, development and stockpiling of nuclear weapons.
At the same time, it stressed that the private sector
involvement in the arsenals of China, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan and Russia
remain largely hidden, with little insight into how much is being contracted
and which companies are getting the deals.
Many of the outstanding contracts identified in the report
were granted around 2015 and are set to expire in 2020, but some of the
contracts have far longer time frames.
For example, one contract for a key component necessary to
launch US Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles runs until at least 2075, the
report showed.
"President Trump is heralding the need for global denuclearization,
but US deeds, and those of nuclear-armed allies do not match those words,"
said Susi Snyder, PAX nuclear disarmament program manager and the lead author
of the report.
"We see the US and other states planning for a
nuclear-armed century, with contracts to maintain weapons through at least
2075, despite growing domestic and global calls to reverse course," she
lamented.
