US withdrawal from INF upsets China
Since the 1988 signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) between the Soviet Union and US, the Cold War agreement abolished all nuclear and conventional missiles both for short-range (500–1,000km) and intermediate-range (1,000–5,500 km) missiles. The treaty did not apply to sea-launched missiles.
The only problem with the treaty was that China was still a military backward nation in 1988 with limited conventional-strike ballistic missile capabilities. Moscow began to complain about the problem in the 1990s when China began fielding the road-mobile DF-11/15 short-range ballistic missile armed with conventional warheads.
Though most were aimed at Taiwan, the Russians saw this
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