MOSCOW. June 13 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia is capable of maintaining a nuclear balance with the United States for a long time regardless of Americans' success in the sphere of testing and deploying the National Missile Defense system, Major General Vladimir Dvorkin, head of the Strategic Nuclear Force Problems and advisor of the PIR Center, said on Thursday.
"The U.S. withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty is not a landmark date. In fact, all issues related to development of strategic nuclear forces in the United States and Russia are determined. They were determined yet before the new treaty was signed. It was done given that the ABM Treaty would soon cease to exist," Dvorkin told Interfax-Military News Agency.
In a situation when Russia is in for military and political integration with the West and certainly with the United States, "irreversibility of this rapprochement and such partnership is the thing that matters," he said.
"In this sense, irreversibility of strategic weapons is of much lesser importance than irreversibility of integration," the expert noted.
According to him, close cooperation between Russia and the United States in development of strategic and non-strategic missile defense is needed to increase the degree of the integration's irreversibility.
"Russia has all prerequisites for equal cooperation, as Russian strategic information assets are in direct proximity to the instability axle in the south and southeast. Russia has some technologies that remain the best in the sphere of rocket building, so they can be used for development of efficient missile defense systems, both strategic and non-strategic ones," Dvorkin said.
Construction of underground shelters for interception missiles that has been launched by the U.S. party in Alaska does not violate the ABM Treaty. It could have been done without the U.S. withdrawal from the treaty.
"But if the United States arranges tests in hitting of an intercontinental missile by a naval missile defense system, it will exceed the limits of the ABM Treaty," the general said.
Earlier it was reported that having withdrawn from the ABM Treaty on Thursday, the United States decided the same day to test a sea-based anti-missile defense system, which had previously been banned by the treaty. The USS Lake Erie that is cruising the Pacific Ocean will try to bring down an SM-3 modernized intercontinental missile that will be launched from a proving range in the Hawaii. A complicated radar of the Spy-1 type will be used for tracking the missile and homing the interceptor missile during the exercise. The radar will give a signal for the launch of the interceptor missile that is to hit the target in the middle of its trajectory.