Describing Russia’s new Oreshnik hypersonic multiple non-nuclear warhead missile, which destroyed a Ukrainian military aerospace facility, Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said:
“I think it’s like the ancient warriors who used to beat their swords against their shields to intimidate their adversaries. The missiles Putin is talking about were recently tested. They are old missiles. There is nothing new about them. They are retouched missiles, in short, they have retouched missiles that they had to try to frighten the Ukrainian adversary”.
It would therefore be, as Italian daily newspaper Il Tempo headlines, a ‘Putin bluff’. But the reality is described by an arms expert, Pietro Batacchi, editor of the Italian magazine Defence, in an article titled “Back to the Euromissiles and the darkest days of the Cold War”:
“Europe is suddenly back in the darkest days of the Cold War. The Russian ‘pre-nuclear’ demonstration strike – as we called it – demonstrated the availability in Moscow’s arsenal of a new intermediate-range missile equipped with multiple independent re-entry vehicle (MIRV) warheads’.”
To understand the seriousness of the situation that Mr. Tajani is trying to conceal by telling the Italians about “old missiles that have been repainted”, it’s first necessary to understand what Euromissiles are. They are missiles with a range of between 499 km and 5,000 km that the United States deployed in Europe in the 1980s: Pershing 2 ballistic missiles in West Germany and Tomahawk cruise missiles in Italy (at Comiso), the United Kingdom, West Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, against which the Soviet Union countered with SS-20 ballistic missiles deployed on its territory in European Russia. This very dangerous category of nuclear weapons, designed for close nuclear combat, had been eliminated by the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty signed in 1987 by Presidents Gorbachev and Reagan. In 2014, when the Maidan Square coup triggered NATO’s new confrontation with Russia, the Obama administration accused Moscow, without any evidence, of testing a cruise missile of the banned category, and in 2019 (during the Trump administration) the US withdrew from the INF Treaty.
Since then, the US has resumed production of intermediate-range missiles to be deployed in Europe close to Russia, disguising them as missiles intended to protect Europe from the ‘Russian nuclear threat’. Russia responded by producing missiles like the Oreshnik to be deployed in the European part of its territory. The fact remains that while US intermediate-range missiles deployed in Europe can hit Moscow within minutes of launch, similar missiles deployed by Russia in the European part of its territory can hit European capitals but not Washington.
Having understood this scenario, it is crucial to understand the destructive power of the arsenals of the two major nuclear powers, the US and Russia. This is shown to us in the documentary ‘The True Scale Of Modern Nuclear Weapons’ by the US channel Science Time which, based on precise scientific data, shows what the effects of a US nuclear attack on Moscow and Beijing and a Russian nuclear attack on San Francisco and New York would be.
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This article was originally published in Italian on Grandangolo, Byoblu TV.
Manlio Dinucci, award winning author, geopolitical analyst and geographer, Pisa, Italy. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).
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