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Russian, U.S. Experts to Discuss National Missile Defense NewsMax.com WiresMOSCOW – Experts from Russia's Foreign and Defense Ministries will soon start discussions with their U.S. colleagues over the building of a national missile defense system (NMD), the RIA Novosti news agency reported Sunday. Vice Adm. Valentin Kuznetsov, a senior official in the Russian Defense Ministry's international cooperation section, vowed that at the talks Moscow "will firmly defend" its position that finds U.S. plans to create the NMD are "unacceptable." Kuznetsov did not say when the talks could start. He added that Moscow would "attentively follow the Bush administration's future steps in relation to the missile defense and would act in accordance with these steps." "So far, the Americans haven't made any firm decisions on building up the NMD," added Kuznetsov. "All those tests that the United States has already carried out in this area eventually failed, and produced more questions than answers to the task of building an effective national missile defense." Kuznetsov predicted that the Bush administration would at some time realize that the original concept of creating an NMD was nothing more than a "soap bubble." Such realization, argued Kuznetsov, could prompt President Bush and his aides to "rectify the NMD architecture that had been proposed by the Clinton [administration] and even consider designing a new concept of the NMD architecture." Russia insists that Washington's unilateral creation of the NMD would undermine the basic principles of global strategic stability that has been laid out in the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972. Last week, Russian President Vladimir Putin said in an online press conference that the ABM treaty was the cornerstone of global security whose destruction would entail grave consequences. "The moment we take this ... out, the whole system automatically falls apart," warned Putin. U.S. advocates of a national missile defense say that Moscow itself has been violating the 1972 ABM treaty for decades. Copyright 2001 by United Press International.
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