The United States will begin deploying long-range weapons in Germany in 2026 in a bid to demonstrate its commitment to defending NATO — the Western military alliance — and Europe, the US and Germany said in a joint statement on Wednesday (10).
This will include the deployment of SM-6 Tomahawk cruise missiles and hypersonic weapons under development, which have a longer range than current weapons in Europe, the countries said.
Land-based missiles with a range exceeding 500 kilometers were banned until 2019 by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, signed by Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union and former U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
The deal marked the first time the two superpowers agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals and eliminate an entire category of weapons.
Thus, Germany, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic destroyed their missiles in the 1990s, followed by Slovakia and Bulgaria.
The United States withdrew from the treaty in 2019, saying Moscow was violating it, citing Russia’s development of the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile, known within NATO as the SSC-8.
The Kremlin repeatedly denied the accusation and later imposed a moratorium on its own development of missiles that had been banned by the treaty — ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of between 500 and 5,500 km.
Source: CNN Brasil
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