Russia Considers Missile Defense

Wade Boese

Long opposed to U.S. missile defense plans, top Russian officials voiced interest throughout January in exploring missile defenses on their own or in cooperation with the United States. But Russia has little money to spend on such a project, and discussions of joint U.S.-Russian missile defense work have been tentative and yielded little.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov, and Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov all said separately in January that Russia is interested in building missile defenses and would not rule out developing systems in conjunction with the United States. Sergei Ivanov, however, was quoted by various news agencies January 15 cautioning that Russian efforts would be governed by “common sense, technical possibilities, and the state of our economy.”

Russian total annual defense expenditures in recent years have been estimated at roughly $40 billion. The United States is proposing to spend more than $9 billion on missile defenses alone in fiscal year 2004. (See ACT, March 2003.)

U.S. Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow said at a January 9 speech in Washington, D.C., that not much progress has been made between the United States and Russia in moving toward greater cooperation on missile defenses. “Dialogue on missile defense cooperation, which has been launched, still remains handicapped by Russian military suspicions that we are just trying to steal some of their technology,” Vershbow reported.

Russia, however, is not singularly at fault. “Both sides need to overcome inhibitions to more substantial cooperation on missile defense which could encompass joint early warning and even joint development of the architecture and the systems,” Vershbow noted.

Past U.S.-Russian efforts at joint cooperation on missile defenses have fared poorly. A joint project to design two satellites for observing global missile launches, the Russian-American Observation Satellite, has floundered since being initiated in 1992; and Russian offers to explore theater missile defenses with NATO made little headway because of difficulties in moving from general concepts to specific details.

Russia deploys nuclear-armed missile interceptors around Moscow, but the defense is not considered to be operationally sound. Russia began deploying the system in the 1960s and kept it as the one legal exception granted by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had forbidden the United States and Soviet Union from deploying nationwide strategic ballistic missile defenses.