World

Russia Nixes Missile Defense

June 29, 2001 / 11:18 AM EDT / AP

A top general said Russia is willing to discuss how to ward off missile threats that worry the United States — but will insist on sticking to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty that bans nationwide missile defense, the ITAR-Tass news agency reported Friday.

The United States says it needs to build such a system to ward off potential attacks by so-called rogue states such as North Korea, not, it says, to blunt the deterrent power of Russia's thousands of warheads.

Russia, however, remains opposed and says missile defense would provoke a new arms race as countries try to find ways to defeat it.

Gen. Leonid Ivashov, the head of the Defense Ministry's Department of International Cooperation, said that Russia was willing "to sit down at the negotiating table for consultations with NATO and the United States, assess the world situation, and we are ready to discuss missile threats."

But he said that while Russia was ready to talk about "military-political and diplomatic measures" to ward off threats, he said Russia would insist the U.S. not scrap the ABM treaty.

"If the United States begins deployment of an anti-missile system, Russia will announce that Washington has de facto abrogated the ABM treaty," he said.

The treaty, negotiated between the United States and the Soviet Union, allows each side only one system of ground-based interceptor rockets to be deployed in a sharply defined area around either the capital or an offensive missile installation.

Defense systems that cover the entire country are banned on the theory that neither side would start a nuclear war if it knew it was defenseless against retaliation — the principle of mutual assured destruction.