WASHINGTON, July 12. /TASS/. The plan announced by Washington and Berlin to deploy new US weapons in Germany is an "extremely serious US escalation" as regards nuclear threats to Russia, Theodore Postol, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told TASS.
"It is hard for me to see how the Russian government will be able to ignore such an extremely serious US escalation in its nuclear threat to Russia," said the US expert in missile defenses, who was an advisor to the Chief of Naval Operations and worked at Stanford University and in Argonne National Laboratory.
According to him, the statement from Washington and Berlin means that a mobile modification of the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense System that can launch nuclear-capable ballistic missiles may be deployed in Germany. "Currently, this system will be able to launch cruise missiles and anti-aircraft missiles from the Aegis system canisters that make up the core of the system strike capabilities," he argued. "However, it is possible to also load the canisters with nuclear-capable ballistic missiles, when they are developed and modified to be compatible with the launch system," he added.
Postol said the system poses an "extremely alarming very short warning nuclear attack credit to Russia." "This is the same kind of very short warning nuclear threat that would have existed if the Soviet Union had not withdrawn its ballistic missiles from Cuba in 1962," he emphasized.
Washington and Berlin said earlier in a joint statement that the US would begin deployments of long-range fires capabilities in Germany in 2026, "which have significantly longer range than current land-based fires in Europe."
Commenting on the announcement, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Thursday that necessary work to prepare complementary countermeasures was started by relevant Russian agencies in advance and it has since been done systematically.