US hopes for missile shield accord this year: report

Jan 13, 2012 Spacewar.com (AFP)

Washington - The United States hopes to reach a deal with Russia by the end of the year for the deployment of a ballistic missile shield in Europe, the State Department's top arms control official said.

"We will get a missile defense agreement for cooperation with Russia," Undersecretary of State for Arms Control Ellen Tauscher said Thursday, according to the website of Foreign Policy magazine.

"This is the place where we can begin to put aside the Cold War and mutually assured destruction' and move toward mutually assured stability'."

The United States has long wanted to deploy a missile defense system in eastern Europe that it says would be directed at Iran, but Russia has objected, saying such a system would undercut its own nuclear deterrent.

"The only way they are going to be assured ... the system does not undercut their strategic deterrent is to sit with us in the tent in NATO and see what we are doing. They will only be their own eyes and ears," Tauscher said.

"Is it a political leap of faith? Yes. Are they ready to do it? No. But we are hoping that these strategic stability talks over the next eight months will start to loosen these old ties that have been binding everybody in the old way of thinking."

President Dmitry Medvedev said in November that Moscow was prepared to deploy short-range Iskander missiles in the Kaliningrad enclave that borders EU members Poland and Lithuania in response to the deployment of a missile shield.

Romania and Poland have agreed to host part of a revamped US missile shield, and NATO member Turkey has also decided to host an early warning radar.

The United States and Russia entered into their first nuclear arms deal in two decades last year, agreeing to reduce warhead ceilings by 30 percent and limit each side to 700 deployed long-range missiles and heavy bombers.

Medvedev and US President Barack Obama signed the new START in Prague in 2010 as the two sides tried to "reset" relations that soured under the eight-year Republican administration of George W. Bush.