Visiting US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday re-affirmed Washington’s intention to go on testing its controversial missile defense shield even if no agreement is struck with Moscow.
“President Bush made it very clear that he believes there is a threat, a new threat, and we will need to move, to go beyond ABM so that we can have a serious testing and evaluation program that gets us a solution to the threat,” Rice said after meeting President Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin.
US President George W. Bush “has not set a specific deadline, but it should be obvious to all concerned that the president believes that this is something that will happen relatively soon,” she said. “The testing program will proceed.”
Her comments confirmed Monday’s statement by Bush, who warned that “if we can’t reach agreement, we’re going to implement” the missile defense shield, which Russia opposes, saying it could spark a new arms race.
Bush and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin have agreed to link negotiations on missile defense to bilateral nuclear arms cuts, a proposal that Rice said was “heavily discussed” during her meetings with Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov and Security Council secretary Vladimir Rushailo.
“President Bush has said that the United States intends to bring down its strategic forces to the level commensurate with its concern about deterrence,” Rice said. “He wants to do it at the lowest possible level.”
But she re-affirmed the United States’ desire to scrap the ABM, and create a brand new strategic stability architecture.
“The ABM is very restrictive,” she told reporters after her Kremlin talks. “We don’t want to be constantly accused of violating the ABM treaty, that’s why we are talking about going beyond, and not line by line.”
“The question now is not are moving forward, but how we are moving forward, and this is considerable progress,” she said.
