America is using Soviet experience in its ABM program

Only very lazy people will not kick the American National ABM project. This plan has been criticized a lot, which surely does not add optimism to the current resident in the White House. Well, this is absolutely correct: terrorists are out there wandering all over America, searching for new targets. At the same time, America is going to spend billions of dollars on the destruction of mythical missiles, which are allegedly going to be launched by the countries of “axis of evil.” Isn’t this absurd?

It seems that America itself does not believe that, let’s say, Hussein will dare to launch a ballistic missile in the USA. However, the program has been prepared, and the money has been assigned. Here is the conclusion: the United States is not going to step back. Furthermore, America is going to attract European and Asian partners to the development of the nuclear shield in order to share the fame (or defeat) with them. Washington even decided to change the name of the program for those purposes. The Washington Post wrote that the Pentagon used the term “the national anti-missile defense,” when Clinton was in power, but Donald Rumsfeld removed the word “national” from it last year. This withdrawal is connected with the USA’s intention for larger integration of the planned anti-missile shield. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, mentioned that geography was very important in the anti-missile defense field, meaning that its radars and anti-missile emplacements should be located as close as possible to potential missile-launching sites of the enemy in the Middle East and in Asia).

As a matter of fact, America has been cooperating with several countries in the field of the ABM defense. There is the Arrow projection, which is conducted with Israel; Medium Extended Air Defense System, with Italy and Germany; Standard Missile III program, with Japan; and RAMOS spy satellites, with Russia. The USA has pulled out from the 1972 ABM Treaty for the sake of further cooperation, since the document did not allow Washington to share its missile projects with its allies.

However, the problem is the fact that the American president’s administration does not really know which kind of system it is going to deploy. The administration has several experimental projects at the present moment: to test ground- and sea-based anti-missiles and space-based ABM devices.

Dmitry Chirkin PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov