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Russia to challenge NMD plan
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RUSSIA on Monday warned that it will take peer-to-peer steps to ensure strategic security if the US tear up a vital footstone pact — the treaty on limiting anti-ballistic missiles signed by Moscow and Washington in 1972, or deploy a worldwide-criticized national missile shield.
“We will have to take additional opposite measures to keep a strategic balance if the United States decides to withdraw from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty," Russian Defence Minister Marshal Igor Sergeyev told an exclusive interview with the Interfax news agency.
“Russia has ideas which will help to maintain a sufficient security level, but these strong measures will be taken as a forced response," he stressed. “I do not doubt that a number of other countries will do the same."
Sergeyev, who was the commander-in-chief of the Strategic Missile Troops before taking the ministerial post, said, “Even during the period of (former US President Ronald) Reagan's ‘Star Wars', we have worked out three mighty programmes to drastically counteract the US national missile defence (NMD) system."
“A lot of money was invested in those programmes and a lot of technologies have been developed, which are still effective and doable. This made it realistic and possible to develop corresponding offensive and defensive weapons against NMD," he said.
Russian military specialists sniff the missile defence plan as “a strategic mistake", Sergeyev said, as “it cannot guarantee US national security, but will prompt a new phase of the arms race and ruin the existent system of arms control".
He urged Washington to make joint efforts with the international community to improve the current mechanism for control over the non-proliferation of missile technologies and “give priority to political methods of solving the military security problem".
Russia has repeatedly stated its strong opposition to the US desire to revise the ABM treaty and create a NMD system, against which most Western allies also express argument. Sergeyev's Monday remarks are the strongest and the most concrete warning since the new US administration declared “go-ahead" for the NMD. (SD-Agencies)
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