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Russian Defense Minister: Missile Threat to US Not Real
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said Friday that the current US government's proposal for building a missile defense system is based on an alleged threat from long-range attack.
The heart of U.S. President George W. Bush's case for building a missile defense is "entirely hypothetical" and there are plenty of other threats, he told reporters after meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
In preparation for a U.S.-Russian summit in Europe, Ivanov and Rumsfeld met at NATO headquarters in Brussels for one and a half hours. They agreed that both their countries face serious new threats, but they disagreed on how best to defend against them.
"How to parry these threats or how to approach them in the future ... we don't have absolutely identical views," Ivanov said. "There is nothing terrible, nothing tragic, about that."
The threat of attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles "is nowadays an entirely hypothetical problem," Ivanov said. "There is no chance of it coming back onto the agenda for a long while."
Missile defense is expected to be one of the main focuses of Bush's trip to Europe next week, including a meeting June 13 in Brussels of presidents and prime ministers from all 19 NATO member countries as well as Bush's first face-to-face meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 16.
The Bush administration is considering a system that might be rushed into rudimentary operation as early as 2004, possibly relying on weapons aboard ships or planes as well as on land.
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