February 9, 2005 :: Interfax :: News
In an interview with the Russian Interfax news agency, U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow tried to put the country at ease with the prospect of European-based missile defense interceptors, which are primarily aimed at the growing threat from Iran. Vershbow stressed that any such defense would be limited, that it would be no match for Russia’s massive strategic arsenal, and that moreover geography would make it practically irrelevant to stopping a nuclear attack by Russia on the United States, the capability for which Russia thinks it requires:
If you simply look at the globe, you can see that geographically, any systems that would ultimately be in Europe would be oriented towards threats from the south, the southwest—countries like Iran—and would have no logic vis-a-vis Russian systems, which of course go north, not west.
To say that Russian missiles “go north, not west” is a diplomatic way of saying that Russian missiles still target the United States. The question remains, of course, whether it is the right policy for the United States to deliberately avoid missile defenses capable of providing a strategic defense, a defense against the launch of Russian ICBMs—whether “accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate,” to quote the words of the 1999 National Missile Defense Act—that is, to continue to give Russian missiles “a free ride” to U.S. territory. To avoid such a strategic defense, to avoid defenses against Chinese and Russian missiles (space-based interceptors, for example), needlessly perpetuates the regime of assured destruction, of mutual vulnerability, which the U.S. should have abandoned with the expiration of the 1972 ABM Treaty. (Article)
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