|
Bush Moves Ahead with ABM Withdrawal
WASHINGTON, Dec 12 (News Agencies) - President George W. Bush told top U.S. lawmakers Wednesday that he will soon notify Russia that he plans to pull out of the 1972 ABM treaty in order to forge ahead with the missile shield Moscow opposes.
Bush has always derided the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty as a Cold War relic and asserted neither it, nor resistance from Russia, China, key U.S. allies, or U.S. Democrats would stop him from fielding a missile defense system.
"He thinks that the best way to preserve peace and to promote it is to move beyond the ABM Treaty," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said, adding that Bush diplomacy had led to "a real diminution" in opposition to the plan.
Fleischer declined to confirm the timeframe for Bush's announcement on the six-month notice he is required to give Moscow under the terms of the treaty. Officials who declined to be named said it could come as early as Thursday.
"We have come to the point where we knew we would arrive," a senior U.S. official who requested anonymity said Wednesday. "We're about to give them [the Russians] notice."
Democratic Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said Bush had informed him of the decision during a White House breakfast, and told and reporters he worried about the impact on Washington's relations with its allies.
"It undermines the fragile coalition that we have with our allies ... I think that it's going to complicate as well our relations with Russia, with China, and I think we've got to be very concerned about that," he said.
The news comes after months of Russo-U.S. negotiations on strategic issues and after four meetings between Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin failed to yield an agreement enabling Washington to deploy the defensive arrangement.
"The president made a very strong attempt to try to reach an understanding with the Russians," said the official. "It wasn't possible."
The ABM Treaty was premised on the idea that denying both signatories missile defenses would curb the race to develop ever more deadly offensive weapons, as well as make them less likely to launch a first strike because that would lead to massive nuclear retaliation.
But Bush has pushed ahead with testing and evaluation of technologies for missile defense, and U.S. officials have repeatedly said since July that the program will "bump up" against the treaty's limits within "months, not years."
And, since the September 11 terror strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration has shifted its argument for the system from warning of threats of attack by so-called "rogue states" like Iraq or North Korea, to warnings that such nations could pass lethal technology to terrorists.
Putin has been openly skeptical of that scenario and countered that U.S. withdrawal from the treaty, though perfectly legal, threatens global strategic stability.
Because they've long known the decision was coming, "the Russians are going to react relatively calmly, but this doesn't mean they've acquiesced," said Fiona Hill, a Russian expert at the Washington-based Brookings Institution.
Behind the calm public face, Moscow will fret that the decision sends the wrong message to nascent nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, she said.
"The Russians do not foresee a nuclear standoff between themselves and the United States. But they do see one on their own borders," said Hill.
|
