US Reaffirms Its Will to Abandon ABM Treaty at Certain Time

The United States will withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty at certain time in the future when it concludes that the arms control accord stands in the way towards the development of America's missile defense program, the Bush administration officials said on Sunday.

Secretary of State Collen Powell, in an interview with "Fox News Sunday," said that the United States will get out of the "constraints" of the ABM treaty "when those constraints do not allow us to move forward with our technology."

But Powell gave no hint of any deadline, and he said that the point of time has not yet been reached as the Bush administration is still considering options in the buildup of a comprehensive anti-missile shield.

"Secretary Rumsfeld is hard at work with the technology, and at some point he will come forward to the president and say, 'I can't go forward unless certain constraints in the treaty are removed.' And at that point, we'll have a decision to make," he said.

In another interview with ABC's "This Week,", Powell said that the 1972 ABM treaty is "designed to keep us from moving in this direction" towards the establishment of a missile defense system, but that era "no longer exists."

Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's National Security Adviser, also dismissed the ABM treaty as associating with "another era" of Cold War confrontation. The treaty, she said, "belongs to a relationship of implacable hostility between the US and the Soviet Union, so it's time to move on."

"We think of this as really proposing a new strategic architecture that is more in line with what we need today," Rice said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Also speaking on "Meet the Press," U.S. Senator Joe Biden, the new chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said that he would have the ABM treaty amended rather than being abandoned, because abolishing the treaty would spark "massive new arms race."

Biden's words echoed a strong sentiment among quite a few U.S. Congressmen, who cast doubt about President Bush's ambitious missile defense program due to its technical and financial feasibility, and who argued that scrapping the ABM treaty would risk breaking up the existing strategic balance among big powers and prompt new round of arms race around the world.

Powell and Rice made the harsh remarks on ABM treaty just after President Bush concluded his first trip to Europe, where he seemed to have made little progress in winning over Russia as well as the Western allies on the missile defense issue.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, emerging from his first summit meeting with President Bush in Slovenia on Saturday, told the press that Russia still sees the ABM treaty as the "cornerstone" of the international security architecture.






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