The U.S. military carried out a test-flight Sunday of a new road-mobile, ground-launched cruise missile system less than a month after the U.S. and Russia ripped up a landmark arms treaty.
The missile blasted from a launcher on San Nicolas Island, a Navy test site off the coast of Los Angeles, Calif., and sped above the Pacific Ocean for more than 310 miles before hitting a target, per the Pentagon in a statement. “Data collected and lessons learned from this test will inform the Department of Defense’s development of future intermediate-range capabilities,” it said.
The test marks a new era for the U.S. military in the wake of the Aug. 2 collapse of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty. First signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, the INF treaty eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. It forced the superpowers to scrap more than 2,600 land-based missiles with ranges 310 to 3,420 miles — weapons considered destabilizing to the European continent because of their capability to launch a nuclear strike from anywhere without early warning.
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