A top Russian military officer said on November 17 that the national missile defense system planned by the United States "will not guarantee an effective protection even from limited nuclear attacks."

Therefore, Russia should not be deploying its own missile defense system throughout its entire territory in response to the US move that represents a withdrawal from the 1972 ABM treaty, said Colonel General Vladmir Yakovlev, commander-in-chief of Russia's Strategic Missile Force.

The US system "will not meet its name of missile defense because it will not guarantee effective protection even from limited nuclear attacks," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.

Yakovlev described as inadequate the cost effectiveness of the national missile defense system that the US plans to deploy.

"There is no absolute protection from nuclear weapons today," he said.

Yakovlev expressed the belief that the initiators of the missile defense system in Washington "intentionally distort a whole number of parameters of strategic offensive arms limitation treaties in the interests of certain US political and industrial circles."

He warned that Russia has planned "a number of asymmetrical military-technical measures that will be adequate and may be even more serious than the steps now taken (by the US) to sever the ABM treaty."

"I would not want to name them, but I will only say that I see no sense in the development of missile defense," Yakovlev said.

In a related topic, he said Russia would not bring back into operation the missile attack warning station in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia.

In stead, a transfer will be made to a new type of observation and warning system, he said.

"The Krasnoyarsk station was fully dismantled and it won't be restored," Yakovlev said.

He said that Russia is designing new warning stations that "will be based on new principles and the latest electronic equipment."

"They will consume much less electricity and they are more economical and efficient than their predecessors," he said.