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Russian holiday season broken up with US threat on ABM
December 12, 2001
AFP
Moscow maintained a stony silence in response to reports that Washington will within days announce a withdrawal from the 1972 ABM treaty despite Russian efforts to save the fundamental nuclear pact.
Russia marked Constitution Day on Wednesday -- the semi-formal start of a month-long holiday season here -- and officialdom refused to be drawn on a slate of media reports that Washington had made up its mind to abandon a missile pact which is still viewed as the "cornerstone" of global stability in Moscow.
The New York Times wrote that US President George W. Bush informed Vladimir Putin of the decision in a telephone call last Friday when the Russian leader was paying an official visit to Greece.
US officials said the formal Washington announcement would made by January at the latest and could even be issued as early as Thursday.
The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty allows both Moscow and Washington to give a six-month advance notice before unilaterally abandoning a Cold War-era pact that forbids either side from developing broad missile defense systems.
Citing a threat to US security from "rogue states" like North Korea and Iran, Bush made construction of such a shield a key plank of his foreign policy upon election last year.
But Bush has faced some pressure from Europe, US Congressional Democrats and even Secretary of State Colin Powell, who question the wisdom of such a unilateral approach at a time when Washington seeks allies in its global anti-terror campaign.
Russian officials referred all inquiries about the ABM to a Monday statement issued by Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, who then said that Moscow was prepared for the possibility of a unilateral US withdrawal from the pact.
Speaking at a joint press conference with Powell, Ivanov reported that he and the visiting US secretary of state had made no progress on the missile defense dispute.
"Our national security program takes the possibility (of a unilateral US withdrawal) into account," Ivanov said without elaborating further.
His deputy Georgy Mamedov earlier called such a US decision "dangerous," a view backed up Monday by German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder.
Some Russian lawmakers attending a security conference in Washington said Moscow was clearly not pleased with Bush's resolve, but was unlikely to react violently to the move.
"There will be no hysterics" from Moscow in response to a formal US announcement on the ABM, ITAR-TASS quoted Federation Council upper house of parliament foreign affairs committee chairman Mikhail Margelov as saying.
Putin initially threatened to counter a US withdrawal from the pact by abandoning all existing nuclear disarmament agreements and loading up on multiple missile warheads as a defensive measure.
Such threats have not been repeated in recent weeks and Ivanov and Powell even announced this week that they had been instructed to prepare terms of a new nuclear disarmament agreement for Bush's visit to the Russian capital next spring.
However, while seeming ready to accept further US testing of its futuristic missile shield, Russia had sought to preserve the ABM in some form, the treaty representing one of the last vestiges of Moscow's Soviet-era superpower claims.
"Now, Moscow will have its hands untied," said Fond Politika research institute chief Vyacheslav Nikonov, speaking to the ITAR-TASS news agency at the Washington conference.
Nikonov suggested that Russia could now press ahead with Putin's threat to load up on multiple warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles, a view particularly popular in Moscow hawkish defense circles.
Sergei Karaganov, an expert on US-Russia relations, told Moscow news agencies for his part that a unilateral US withdrawal meant that Russia no longer needed to make its own sacrifices on strategic issues.
"All of the responsibility now rests with the US side and its allies," Karaganov said.
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