The United States hopes to develop a "full partnership" with Russia aimed at resolving their long-standing disagreements over the deployment of missile shield technology to Europe, the director of the U.S. Missile Defense Agency said yesterday (see GSN, July 9).
"The (new) approach is to lay out ideas, and not to have a fully developed plan," Lt. Gen. Patrick O'Reilly told Reuters in reference to U.S.-Russian missile defense talks.
"You need to move forward at a prudent pace so that there are collaborative decisions, intermediate decisions made along the way, so that there is true partnership," O'Reilly added.
The general said he had not been asked "to deviate" from a Bush administration proposal to field missile interceptors in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. Russia has adamantly opposed the plan as a threat to its security, largely dismissing U.S. explanations that the system would be focused on an Iranian missile threat (Jim Wolf, Reuters I, July 9).
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev today reaffirmed Moscow's threat to deploy short-range missiles near Poland if Washington moved to field the European defense system.
"If we don't manage to agree on the issues, you know the consequences. What I said during my state of the nation address has not been revoked," Medvedev said (Oleg Shchedrov, Reuters II, July 10).
Russia yesterday expressed willingness to collaborate with the United States on missile defense if Washington first dropped the Europe proposal, Interfax reported.
"We are prepared for cooperation (in missile defense), on condition that this cooperation is equitable. Therefore, we are waiting for our U.S. partners to decide on the future of a third missile defense launch site in Europe," Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko said.
"In the meantime, we are ready to continue assessing possible missile threats requiring our joint reaction. This was laid down in the presidential statement," Nesterenko said, referring to a "joint understanding" on arms control signed Monday by Obama and Medvedev (see GSN, July 6; Interfax I, July 9).
Moscow and Washington have both discussed ideas for missile defense cooperation, but nothing has yet stuck.
By partnering on missile defense, the former Cold War rivals could help address nuclear threats posed by Iran and other Middle Eastern states, said Vladimir Yevseyev with the Institute of Global Economy and International Relations.
"Iran is not the only missile threat because there are many countries in the vast Middle East area which have developed missile programs and arms. Some of them would like to create a nuclear infrastructure," Yevseyev said yesterday in Moscow.
"If we look at the threats we have, we can choose other places [than sites proposed by the United States] to deploy parts of the missile defense system, and use, for instance, Russia's S-400 air defense system and the U.S. Patriot system, which are both capable of intercepting missiles from the Middle East," he said.
Yevseyev backed a proposed Joint Data Exchange Center that would enable Russia and the United States to share information on missile launches. Sharing such data in real time, he said, would be "a very important first step toward creating a common European security system, in which Russia would find a place worthy of itself" (Interfax II, July 9).
Space systems designer Boris Chertok recommended building a U.S.-Russian missile defense system in outer space, Interfax reported.
"Russia and the United States will fail in the next five to 10 years to develop an effective missile defense system in a geostationary orbit on their own," Chertok wrote in an article published Wednesday by the Russian Federal Space Agency. Such a platform, he wrote, would detect missiles during launch preparation or liftoff and destroy them with lasers.
"If material expenses, intellectual potentials and space enthusiasm are pooled together the same as in the [International Space Station] project, a fundamentally new technological system of safeguarding peace could be developed," he wrote.
Chertok also endorsed a proposal, developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Theodore Postol, to target long-range Iranian or North Korean weapons before launch or early in their flight. Postol recommended fielding unmanned aerial vehicles or other antimissile technology to counter such threats, according to Interfax.
"However, if the number of such countries posing rocket threats approaches five such a missile defense system will hardly prove effective," and a space-based system would be more appropriate, Chertok wrote (Interfax III, July 9).