November 14, 2005 :: News
In response to the report Saturday by the Polish daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, Poland’s new prime minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz confirmed Monday that his government has opened a public debate on whether the country should allow the U.S. to install missile defense interceptors base on Polish territory. Marcinkiewicz confirmed that Poland has been in talks for the past three years about the possibility of hosting such a base, and that the government has said it would like Poland to be covered by the U.S. Missile Defense program, but said that, contrary to reports, no decisions have yet been made. “This is an important issue for Poland, related to our security and to our cooperation with an important ally,” Marcinkiewicz said. It was also reported that the Industrial Telecommunications Institute in Warsaw, which makes radar systems, confirmed that it had signed an agreement for cooperation on the project with Boeing in May 2003. The U.S. State Department confirmed that it is Poland’s decision whether to become involved in any missile defense system but the United States welcomes allied participation. “It’s up to them to decide how and whether they will be involved,” said State Department press officer Tom Casey.
Such a site would, as the Prime Minister noted, benefit Poland with enhanced security commitments by the United States. It would also be a major step toward discouraging countries’ reliance, perhaps especially in Europe, upon mutual vulnerability to nuclear attacks as the basis of strategic stability. For the United States, such a base would potentially be useful to allow additional interceptors a chance to intercept a missile coming from the Middle East over the pole and toward America. Russia continues to express concern that such Europe-based sites could negate the threat of its offensive nuclear arsenal against the U.S., but the U.S. continues to emphasize that ground-based midcourse defenses such as those which could possibly be put in Poland would be very likely useless against any Russian missile attack over the pole.
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