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New US Missile Defense Moves Will Collide with ABM: Rumsfeld
The United States has begun testing new approaches to missile defense that inevitably will collide with the 1972 ABM treaty, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
Washington will consult its allies and Russia and China, and the work done so far still falls within the limits of the treaty, said Rumsfeld, who noted that where those limits lie is a matter of legal interpretation.
"We're embarked on a course, because of the totally changed circumstances in the world, to test various types of technologies and approaches to provide ballistic missile defense," he said
"So it doesn't take a stretch of imagination to understand that at some point you begin to bump up against the provisions (of the treaty) regardless of which lawyer you talk to," he told reporters.
Rumsfeld meets in Brussels Thursday with NATO defense ministers and Friday with new Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov for talks that are expected to be dominated by US missile defense plans.
"We are engaged in those consultations and intend to continue them, but we are also beginning the process of initiating those research and development and testing activities with regard to missile defense," he said.
Rumsfeld offered no examples of new lines of research and development and testing activities that the administration intends to pursue despite ABM treaty limits.
He said the Pentagon needed to undertake testing that had not been done previously in order to figure out what overarching approach to take on missile defense.
"Until the United States has undertaken the kind of research and development and testing that we currently are initiating and which have not previously been done, there is not such a thing as what one would characterize a specific architecture or set of architectures," he said
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