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Chirac Reaffirms Support for ABM Treaty
President Jacques Chirac of France on Monday reaffirmed his support for the 1972 ABM missile treaty between the United States and Moscow, which Washington has said it wants to abandon.
"At this stage, we want to pursue our bilateral dialogue with our American allies and with NATO," Chirac told an audience of French ambassadors gathered in Paris for their annual conference on foreign policy.
US President George W. Bush confirmed last week that he intended to step away from the arms control treaty to allow US forces to deploy a missile shield to protect their territory from attack.
The move has angered Russia, which inherited the treaty from the former Soviet Union, and upset US allies in Europe who fear that it could trigger a new arms race.
Bush has in turn attempted to persuade the world that the defensive umbrella would serve to intercept any sneak attacks by missiles from "rogue states,", and was not intended as a challenge to Moscow.
Chirac repeated that he remained supportive of the "constitutive elements" of the ABM treaty and insisted that any changes could weaken attempts to prevent weapons proliferation or damage the "strategic balance".
Chirac said it was essential to reinforce efforts to prevent an arms race and prevent the spread of nuclear, biological weapons, and underlined the neccessity of the "non-militarisation of space".
Some of the missile shield designs on the Pentagon's drawing board would involve space-baced weapons capable, in theory, of knocking out incoming missiles or missile warheads before they reached US territory.
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