Russian Plans: Moscow to Upgrade ABM System

Russia is planning to modernize its Moscow-based anti-ballistic missile system, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said yesterday.  The Russian Security Council approved the plan a year and a half ago.

“The plans will be implemented,” Ivanov said, according to Interfax (Deutsche Presse-Agentur/European Internet Network, Dec. 18).

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ABM Treaty: U.S. Provides Official Explanation

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles led the United States to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, U.S. officials said in a diplomatic note.  According to the treaty’s language, a withdrawing party must provide “a statement of the extraordinary events the notifying party regards as having jeopardized its supreme interests.”  The United States sent a note to Russia and other nations announcing its intention to withdraw from the treaty (see GSN, Dec. 13).

“Since the treaty entered into force in 1972, a number of state and non-state entities have acquired or are actively seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. It is clear, and has recently been demonstrated, that some of these entities are prepared to employ these weapons against the United States,” said the note.

“Moreover, a number of states are developing ballistic missiles, including long-range ballistic missiles, as a means of delivering weapons of mass destruction.  These events pose a direct threat to the territory and security of the United States and jeopardize its supreme interests.”

The note was sent Dec. 13 to Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine, the four states that signed a 1997 agreement with the United States naming them treaty successors to the Soviet Union (U.S. State Department release, Dec. 14).

More Russian Reaction

Russian President Vladimir Putin said the United States was never interested in modifying the ABM Treaty, only in leaving it behind.

“In principle, [Russia was] prepared for certain modifications of the treaty.  We asked to be given specific parameters that stood in the way of U.S. desires to develop defensive systems and implement programs.  We were fully prepared to discuss those parameters,” Putin said in an interview the same day as the U.S. announcement.

“But nothing specific was given to us, no specific parameters to be negotiated.  We heard only insistent requests for bilateral withdrawal from the treaty,” Putin said.

“To this day I fail to understand this insistence, given our position, which was fairly flexible,” Putin added.

Despite the U.S.-Russian disagreement, Putin said the Bush administration’s views were clearly presented and argued.  “Their position can be contested, one can disagree with that position, as I do.  But one cannot say that in acting the way they did, they violated anything or did anything on the sly.  On the contrary, they acted in a consistent way and quite openly.  So there is a certain logic to that approach, we were aware of that logic, there was nothing surprising,” Putin said (Financial Times, Dec. 15).

U.N. Reaction

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan “noted with regret” the U.S. decision, in a statement issued Friday.  Annan said the treaty “has served for many years as a cornerstone for maintaining global peace and security and strategic stability.”

In addition, Annan said the treaty’s annulment could “provoke an arms race, especially in the missile area, and further undermine disarmament and nonproliferation regimes” (U.N. release, Dec. 14).

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U.S. Plans:  Navy Theater Defense System Canceled

The U.S. Defense Department Saturday canceled its Navy missile defense development program due to poor performance and budget overruns.  “It’s unfortunate we’ve reached this point,” said Edward Aldridge, the Pentagon’s acquisition chief.

The cancellation of the program came one day after U.S. President George W. Bush announced the United States would leave the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to have greater freedom to conduct missile defense tests (see GSN, Dec. 13).  The Bush administration had said one of the key reasons why the United States pulled out of the treaty was to be able to test a sea-based defense system.

The program, called Area Missile Defense, was designed to protect U.S. Navy ships and ports against attacks from missiles and manned aircraft, according to the Washington Post.  The system, which was scheduled to be deployed in two years, has cost $2.8 billion since the early 1990s, the Post reported.

The Area Missile Defense system was one of the most advanced of the theater defense systems, according to Phil Coyle, former head of the Pentagon’s office of weapons testing and evaluation.  He said development of theater defense systems, which are meant to defend against shorter-range missiles, was far ahead of plans for a national missile defense system, which would defend against long-range missiles.

“And so for one of the shortest-range systems to be canceled is not a good sign,” Coyle said.

“You have to consider this a very serious setback for missile defense programs, because it shows that even the simple stuff is difficult,” said Joseph Cirincione, missile defense expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (Ricks/Mufson, Washington Post, Dec. 16).

A major technical flaw in the system was that its ship-based targeting computers did not work well with the Aegis radar systems on missile cruisers, according to the New York Times.  The radars are designed to track aircraft, which are larger and slower than missiles.  The Navy had been experimenting with new computer systems that could have enabled a ship to receive information from several different sensors, such as satellites and airplanes, the Times reported.

The only way the Pentagon could have salvaged the program, according to Congressional rules, was to have certified that it was essential to national security, that costs could be brought down and that there were no other alternatives, the Times reported.  Senior Pentagon officials decided that they could not make that case.

The cancellation of the Area Missile Defense program will allow the Defense Department to spend more money on developing ship-based missile defenses against longer-range missiles, officials said.  Such programs are designed to shoot down missiles soon after launch or while up in the atmosphere, according to the Times.

“This is a seriously flawed decision,” said Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy.  “Everybody understands we have to have missile protection for our carrier battle groups and marines and other forward elements,” Gaffney said.  “This is not a way to find resources” (James Dao, New York Times, Dec. 16).

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Taiwan:  Military to Deploy Home-Grown Shield

Taiwan plans to use a domestically developed missile defense shield instead of U.S. Patriot anti-missile systems, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday (see GSN, Dec. 12).

The low-altitude missile defense system, called ATBM, is scheduled for installation by 2005, the Taiwanese newspaper Liberty Times reported, according to Agence France-Presse.  The system, which will help defend central and southern Taiwan, will take 10 years to install and cost $8.7 billion, according to former Premier Tang Fei.

The ATBM system uses phased array radars similar to those installed on U.S. Navy Aegis-class destroyers, said Chao Yao-ming, an official at the Chungshan Institute of Science and Technology, which has developed the ATBM system. 

The ATBM system has been chosen over the U.S. Patriot III, which could have taken a long time to be integrated into Taiwan’s defenses, the Times reported.  “That’s why the Patriot weaponry was not on the arms shopping list Taipei presented Washington this year,” said a Taiwanese military official (Agence France-Presse, Dec. 16).

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Israel:  System Will Destroy Missile Launch Pads

Israel has begun developing unmanned aerial vehicles designed to destroy missile launch pads, according to Israeli Maj. Gen. Itzhak Ben-Israel, head of the Israel Defense Forces Authority for Weapons Research and Development. The aircraft would release a weapon to destroy a missile site prior to missile launch rather than try to intercept a missile shortly after launch, which past Israeli defense doctrine emphasized, Ben-Israel said.

Israel has requested $400 million in U.S. funding for the program, but the United States has so far deferred the request.  The Bush administration was likely to approve the funding in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Ben-Israel said.  Israel would continue developing the project even without U.S. funding, Ha’aretz reported.

Israel Aircraft Industries is the primary contractor for the project (Amnon Barzilai, Ha’aretz, Dec. 17).

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