MOSCOW, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Soviet leaders should never have scrapped their SS-20 missiles, Russia's defense minister said Wednesday.
Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov told the State Duma, the main chamber of the Russian parliament, Wednesday that the country was much weaker because former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to eliminate the feared SS-20s nearly 20 years ago under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.
"The gravest mistake was the decision to scrap a whole class of missile weapons -- medium-range ballistic missiles," Ivanov said. Today, dozens of other countries around the world deploy similar missiles, he said.
"Only Russia and the United States do not have the right to have such weapons, although they would be quite useful for us," Ivanov said according to the RIA Novosti report.
Under the INF Treaty the United States and the Soviet Union agreed to scrap ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 300 to 3,400 miles. "By the treaty's deadline of June 1, 1991, a total of 2,692 such weapons had been destroyed, 846 by the U.S. and 1,846 by the Soviet Union," RIA Novosti said.
The Soviet SS-20s were two-stage, medium-range missiles, many of them mobile that targeted Western Europe. The Untied States in the 1980s deployed Pershing-II mobile missiles as a counter-force to them.
RIA Novosti noted that Defense Minister Ivanov's comments "coincide with renewed U.S. plans to deploy elements of its anti-missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic." Russian leaders have repeatedly expressed their anger over that policy saying it threatens Russian national security.
