#4
Russia will always be able to break through any US missile defence - army source
Interfax

Moscow, 13 December: Russia has worked out measures "that can minimize the negative consequences" of the US decision on Thursday to unilaterally back out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, military and diplomatic sources in Moscow have said.

"In purely military terms, Moscow is considering about 20 measures that do not require any substantial increase in expenditures and can be taken in response to the US withdrawal from the ABM treaty," one of the sources told Interfax.

He said Russian leaders do not believe that "from the military point of view the departure of the US from the ABM treaty will lead to any substantial decrease in the potential of Russia's strategic offensive armaments".

One possible measure is to lift restrictions put on the Topol missile complex by a strategic armaments treaty. "We may give up these restrictions, which would radically change the Topol both in the sense of breaking through the NMD [planned US national missile defence] and in the sense of the combat equipment of its missiles," the source said.

He said the impending US withdrawal from the ABM treaty "leaves no other choice to Russia than to develop its own means of breaking through the American NMD and equipping its strategic forces with them".

The US NMD idea "is quite dubious both from the point of view of military policy and from the point of view of technological resources. Russia will always be able to break through any American NMD system. Both Russian and American professionals in the NMD field realize perfectly well that it is impossible to create a system of absolute protection," he said.

The sources interviewed by Interfax said the United States' departure from the ABM treaty may block the process of reduction of nuclear weapons, end strategic stability and destroy the nuclear-deterrence regime.

"This step will move nuclear powers, above all China, and also threshold states, to intensify their programmes of development of strategic armaments," one of the sources said.

The sources claimed that it would take the United States at least six years to deploy the NMD from the moment of its declaration of departure from the ABM treaty.

According to the sources, Pentagon experts believe that the NMD will be able to intercept 300 to 350 Russian strategic missiles and that Russia will be able to keep only 600 to 700 nuclear warheads by between 2007 and 2010.

"All these calculations as well as allegations by individual persons in the Pentagon that the USA is in a position to destroy up to 450 strategic missiles with conventional weapons raise serious doubts," the sources said.

The ABM treaty, signed by the Soviet Union and the United States, bans both parties from creating a national missile defence.

But it allows each party to build a stationary surface-to-air missile shield for only one, strictly marked region - Moscow Region in Russia as legal successor to the Soviet Union and the area of the intercontinental ballistic missile base in Grand Forks, North Dakota, in the United States.

Each region can have a maximum of 100 launchers and no more than 100 strategic missile defence systems.

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