President Donald Trump announced on October 22 he wants to pull American out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF).
The treaty was signed by Ronald Reagan and his Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987.
The US has accused Moscow of violating the terms of the nuclear arms agreement.
But the Kremlin has rejected the accusations, stressing the scrapping of the INF treaty would force Russia to take measures to ensure its security.
What is the INF treaty?
The origins of the treaty come from the late 1970s and early 1980s when the Soviet Union developed a missile – the SS-20 – which could strike Europe from Russia.
The US had short-range missiles in Europe, which could not reach Soviet territory and noting in the middle category.
If the Soviets attacked Europe with the SS-20, America would have to escalate to its biggest weapons.
So the US deployed the Pershing II ballistic missile and a new ground-launched cruise missile into Europe which concerned the soviets as it could reach Moscow in under ten minutes.
To cut the tension between the two countries, the INF treaty was drafted.
The 1987 INF treaty required the United States and the Soviet Union to eliminate and permanently forswear all of their nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with range of 500 to 5,500 kilometre.
The treaty marked the first time the superpowers had agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals, eliminate an entire category of nuclear weapons and utilise extensive on-site inspections for verification.
As a result of the INF treaty, the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed a total of 2,696 short, medium and intermediate-range missiles by the treaty’s implementation deadline of June 1, 1991.
Why is the treaty causing chaos between the US and Russia?
Donald Trump has declared he is going to withdrawn the US from the key nuclear treaty with Russia as they had broken the terms, but the Kremlin denied any wrongdoing.
The president said Russia had been “violating it for many years” and “we’re not going to let them violate a nuclear agreement and go out and do weapons and we’re not allowed to.”
Russia has repeatedly been accused of cheating and flight-testing and deploying an INF-range cruise missile called the 9M729.
However, China could be another reason why Donald Trump wants to withdraw from the treaty, as the superpower has never been a signatory of the INF treaty.
As such they have been able to develop a vast arsenal of weapons and ballistic missiles, which the US are legally prevented from deploying.
Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to discuss US plans to exit the arms treaty with Donald Trump when the two meet in Paris on November 11, the Kremlin said on Monday.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters: “There are still a lot of questions concerned strategic stability, even more so in the context of the stated US intension to leave the INF.
“All of this will of course be on the agenda.”