Source: Carnegie
Originally published in Arms Control Today October 2002
Since at least 1999, much of the arms control and Russia-watching communities repeatedly cautioned that U.S. plans to develop and deploy national missile defense would bring on the next “great train wreck” in U.S.-Russian relations (to say nothing of the nonproliferation regime). Some Russian analysts in 2000 and 2001 expressed concern that the one-two punch of killing the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and expanding NATO to include the Baltic states would strike such a blow to U.S.-Russian relations that it risked bringing on another Cold War and an arms race as well as a possible security alliance between Moscow and Beijing.