Worries remain over tactical weapons

VILNIUS - A TV interview by Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite in early September pointed to the Baltic country’s ongoing worry about the threat of a tactical nuclear strike by Russia. Asked by the TV3 station why she did not attend the launch of the Russia-U.S. Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) in Prague in April, Grybauskaite said: “Seeing as this could contradict the interests of Eastern European and Baltic countries, I didn’t want to go and drink champagne to toast the prospect,” reports EU Observer.

Vilnius says it mistrusts START because it does not include tactical nuclear weapons. The process, by definition, covers only weapons with delivery systems of 5,500 km or more. But Lithuania is more worried about short-range, or ‘tactical’ weapons deployed by Russia near its border. In particular it fears ‘nuclear landmines’ - devices the size of a large backpack which can be carried by paratroopers behind enemy lines and which can destroy infrastructure or render whole valleys impassable.

Darius Semaska, the chief advisor to Grybauskaite and the former Lithuanian ambassador to the European Council of Ministers’ Political and Security Committee, said that Washington has, since April, gone some way to alleviating her concerns. He declined to go into details, but he added: “It [the issue of tactical weapons] is a matter of concern, of course. It’s something that’s very close to our border, very close to our territory.”
“We would like to have more transparency. The key issue is transparency and confidence-building measures. We have continuously been suggesting this to the Russian side. We hope that at some time our Russian colleagues will respond.”

Arms control experts do not believe Russia has nuclear landmines in active service. Otfried Nassauer, the director of the Berlin Information Center for Transatlantic Security (BITS), said that if Russia still used such devices, it would be a grave breach of promises made in the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, agreed with the West in the early 1990s. “They have not produced any new ones since the 1980s. To my knowledge, they have all been withdrawn from active service and have been removed to more central storage sites to await destruction. There were rumors that a few got lost. But the Russians later said they got them all back,” he said.

“Our friends in the Baltics and from Poland are the most skeptical that this has happened, and they assume that there are still some in active service,” added Nassauer. He estimated that Russia has 2,000 - 2,200 other tactical nuclear weapons that are either active or easy to re-activate, namely anti-aircraft missiles, naval-borne cruise missiles and air-to-ground bombs. Meanwhile, NATO has between 150 and 200 tactical weapons in Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey.

“What they [Russia-bordering NATO/EU states] could and should be concerned about is the bombs. They could be flown into their country with an aircraft,” Nassauer explained. The BITS director suggested that Lithuania dislikes START not because it excludes reduction of tactical weapons, but on the contrary, because it could be a prelude to removing NATO’s tactical deterrent from Europe.

“NATO wants Russia to withdraw its tactical weapons beyond the Ural mountains. The Russian pre-condition for this is for the U.S. to take its tactical weapons out of the European NATO countries. But some of the new member states do not want any of this to happen. They are concerned that the U.S. is willing to accept withdrawal,” he said.