Russian President Calls for Joint Missile Defense SystemRussian President Vladimir Putin on Monday urged the international community to create a joint missile defense system to prevent possible missile threats, instead of a Washington-designed national missile defense (NMD) shield.The international community should set up a joint defense system in the so-called missile-prone directions after determining wherefrom a threat to world strategic stability emanates, Putin said in an interview with the Italian RAI-1 TV station prior to the coming Group of Eight summit in Genoa later this week. Calling as "substantiated" the viewpoint of the American side on the question of strategic stability, Putin was quoted by Itar- Tass news agency as saying in the interview that it is necessary to create conditions for responding to new challenges proceeding from "what mankind has achieved in the sphere of global security up to this time." At the same time, it is important "not to tear down the present architecture of international security, which, to our mind, is very dangerous," the president continued. "We should act only jointly without generating additional threats in the way of struggle against evil, which we have not yet fingered out," he stressed. "In this connection, it seems very important to us first to determine jointly where these threats are, and secondly to determine methods and map out jointly actions in struggle against these supposed threats," Putin underlined. Russia's proposals made to European partners on creating European non-strategic missile defense are based precisely on these points, he said. "My latest dialogue with the U.S. president in Ljubljana shows that we can reach a constructive discussion on the very difficult ABM topic," he said. |
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