U.S. Awaits Russian Response to Delaying Missile Shield

March 18, 2013 JRL Russia List North Korea, Nuclear, Missile Defense

(Bloomberg – bloomberg.com – Gopal Ratnam & Stepan Kravchenko – March 18, 2013)

The Obama administration’s decision to slow work on missile defenses in Eastern Europe has raised hopes of arms control advocates that Russia might respond by agreeing to renewed talks on reducing both nations’ nuclear arsenals.

U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said March 15 that the Pentagon will add 14 land-based missile interceptors in Alaska in response to threats from North Korea. To pay for that move and develop an advanced warhead, he said that about $1 billion would be shifted from efforts to develop a missile shield in Poland and Romania.

The Russian government has yet to respond to Hagel’s announcement. Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin, declined to comment yesterday, though the head of the Russian Parliament’s foreign affairs committee said he isn’t impressed.

“The American side showed their arguments were false and far-fetched” pushing for the European system, and the situation would change fundamentally only if Russia were “in the anti- missile system, not outside it,” Alexei Pushkov said in a phone interview from Moscow.

Putin has opposed U.S. plans to install a missile shield in Eastern Europe, and the disagreement has been one impediment to nuclear arms-reduction talks. While the U.S. has said the European defenses would be aimed at thwarting attacks from rogue states such as Iran, Russia contends it would alter the strategic balance.

Putin’s Concerns

Delaying or even canceling the long-range interceptor rocket that was to have been part of a so-called Phased Adaptive Approach to a European missile shield could help Obama resolve Putin’s concerns, said Tom Collina, the research director of the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based advocacy group.

The move “could help open the door to another round of U.S.-Russian arms reduction talks,” Collina said in a phone interview.

Putin’s objection to the missile defense, though, is only one of many differences he has with Obama’s foreign policy, which also include American support for rebels who toppled the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi and those battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, both longtime Soviet and Russian allies and arms customers.

The U.S.-based system that’s being expanded on the West Coast has interceptors built by Orbital Sciences Corp. (ORB) of Dulles, Virginia, topped by hit-to-kill warheads from Raytheon Co. (RTN), based in Waltham, Massachusetts. Boeing Co. (BA), based in Chicago, manages the $34 billion system that now has 26 interceptors at Fort Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The system hasn’t successfully intercepted a test target since December 2008.

‘Staying Ahead’

Hagel said the move to bolster the U.S. Ground-Based Midcourse Missile Defense system was intended to “stay ahead” of threats posed by North Korea and Iran. North Korea has “no idea of negotiating with the U.S. unless it rolls back its hostile policy,” the official Central News Agency said over the weekend.

Shifting some resources from the European system wouldn’t degrade the U.S. commitment to protecting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Hagel said.

The U.S. is installing a missile shield in Europe in phases. It will be based partly on U.S. Navy ships in the Mediterranean, as well as in Romania and Poland, both former satellites of the Soviet Union.

The final phase that would be postponed involves deploying a faster and bigger rocket. Hagel said the timeline for doing so has now been delayed until at least 2022.

Nuclear Arsenals

Under the terms of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that took effect in 2011, the U.S. and Russia would be limited to no more than 1,550 strategic warheads.

While some U.S. Republican lawmakers have been critical of Democratic President Obama’s efforts to pursue further cuts in nuclear arms, they initially have supported expanding the missile shield in Alaska.

Yesterday, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concern about what he called the “non-deployment” of the fourth phase of the Europe-based system. Still, he said on the “Fox News Sunday” program, “most all of us applaud the efforts to beef up our missile defense on the West Coast.”