In accusing Russia, U.S. risks arms treaty

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration's accusation that Russia violated a key nuclear-weapons treaty leaves the future of the 27-year-old accord in question and further dampens President Obama's hopes to burnish his legacy with deeper cuts to nuclear arsenals.

The State Department's annual report on international compliance of arms-control agreements released Tuesday said the U.S. had determined that Russia was in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty that President Ronald Reagan signed with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.

The treaty says the U.S. and Russia cannot possess, produce, or test-flight a ground-launched cruise missile with a range of 300 to 3,400 miles. Possessing or producing launchers for this type of missiles also is banned under the treaty, which helps protect the the U.S. and its allies in Europe and the Far East.

"We're going to hold them to living up to the commitments that they've made," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said.

The administration has not said where and when the alleged violation occurred, but a Russian official said the concerns dated to 2009. The administration, which said it was prepared to discuss the issue with senior Russian officials, raised its concerns about the treaty with Moscow last year.

The dispute comes at a highly strained time between Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin over Russia's intervention in Ukraine and Putin's grant of asylum to National Security Agency systems analyst Edward Snowden.

Russia has hinted that it wanted out of the treaty.

Back in June 2013, Russian presidential chief of staff Sergei Ivanov lamented that the U.S. never needed the entire class of intermediate-range missiles that the treaty banned unless it planned to go to war with Mexico or Canada. Since the treaty was signed, countries along Russia's borders, such as North Korea, China, Pakistan, and India, have acquired these types of weapons, he said.

"Why can anyone have weapons of this class but the U.S. and we legally cannot?" he said.

Obama doesn't want Russia to pull out of the treaty. The president won Senate ratification of a New START treaty, which took effect in February 2011 and requires the U.S. and Russia to reduce the number of their strategic nuclear weapons to no more than 1,550 by February 2018.

Obama announced last year that he wanted to cut the number of U.S. nuclear arms an additional third.