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US calls off missile defense tests to avoid possible ABM treaty trouble: Rumsfeld
WASHINGTON, Oct 25 (AFP)

The Pentagon has called off two missile defense tests ahead of talks next month between President George W. Bush and Russia's President Vladimir Putin to avoid accusations it was violating the 1972 ABM treaty, US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced.

Asked whether the action was taken to reward Russia for its support of the US air campaign in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld said: "It's not a bone to anybody."

Rumsfeld reaffirmed the longstanding US position that the treaty should be set aside by the United States and Russia to allow unrestricted testing and development of defenses against ballistic missiles.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks he said, the ABM treaty was "even less relevant today."

But Rumsfeld said talks next month between Bush and Putin in New York, Washington and at the president's ranch in Crawford, Texas would take up the question of what to do about the treaty, which bars the deployment of a national missile defense system.

"For some time now, we've advised the Congress and the government of the Russian Federation that the planned missile defense testing program that we had was going to bump up against the ABM Treaty," he said. "That has now happened."

"This reality, it seems to me, provides an impetus for the discussions that President Bush has been having with President Putin, and which will continue here in Washington early next month," he said.

In the first test, which had been scheduled for Wednesday, an Aegis radar on a surface ship was to be used to track an interceptor missile in test interception of a strategic ballistic missile target, he said.

The target missile was to have been tracked by a multiple target tracking radar at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

In the second test, scheduled for November 14, and Aegis radar was to have been used to track the launch of a Titan II space launch vehicle, he said.

Rumsfeld said all options -- modifying the treaty, setting it aside, or withdrawing from it unilaterally -- could be on the table.

Asked whether a deal could be worked out to modify the treaty to accommodate the US missile defense program and forestall a US withdrawal, Rumsfeld said, "I just don't know. We'll have to see what happens. But certainly those discussions are going forward."

In the meantime, he said, the Pentagon had decided to refrain voluntarily from carrying out the two scheduled tests that lawyers could construe as violations of the treaty.

The use of the Aegis radar on a surface ship would ostensibly run afoul of the treaty's ban on testing and development of sea-based components of a national missile defense system.

"We are continuing with many aspects of the very robust test development program," Rumsfeld said.

"But as I've indicated, there are some things that some people could raise, I do not want to put the United States in a position of having someone raise a question about whether or not something is a violation of a treaty. I don't think that's the position the United States wants to be in," he said.

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