PARIS, November 4 (AVN) -- Visiting former secretary of the Russian presidential Security Council Andrei Kokoshin on Thursday denounced U.S. plans to establish a limited national missile defence system.
These plans not only contradict the 1972 ABM Treay, but ruin the entire structure of strategic stability treaties signed in the last quarter of the 20th century, promote proliferation of missile and nuclear technologies and contribute to the arms race, Kokoshin told the Military News Agency at the "Globalisation in the 21st Century" international conference.
Kokoshin called inconclusive recent U.S. statemets saying the limited missile defence system is aimed only against new members of the nuclear club, not at Russia, China or other countries. He said he had expressed his tough stance during his meetings with NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson, French Defence Minister Alain Richard, Secreatry-General of the Council of Europe Javier Solana and Finnish President Marti Ahtisaari.
According to Kokoshin, the nuclear containment system is based more on psychological appreciation of the parties' military potential than on precise and detailed calculation of technical and strategic capacities of a certain weapon system. Thus, even a limited missile defence system with little effectivity, such as the one that the Unitied States is planning to deploy by 2004 or 2005, will affect the philospohy of nuclear containment in the 21st century, he stressed.
Russia retains technical capacities to prevent this negative scenario, but its entanglement in the arms race can hardly be considered positive, Kokoshin said.