NATO allies plan to announce at their May 20-21 summit in Chicago that the European missile interceptor system has reached an “interim capability,” a senior U.S. official said on March 26.
This week at an international nuclear security summit in South Korea, President Barack Obama's private request to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for "space" on his proposal for cooperation on missile defense was overheard from a live microphone and grabbed the headlines.
Volume 3, Issue 4, March 19, 2012
In recent weeks, a handful of Congressional Republicans have charged that the Obama administration and the Defense Department are failing to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal and weapons production complex "as promised" in 2010 during consideration of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START).
Russia has opposed U.S. ballistic missile defense plans for decades, and differences over that issue currently are a major irritant in U.S.-Russian relations. There have been numerous proposals for U.S.-Russian and NATO-Russian missile defense cooperation, but often they lack reciprocity and fail to significantly improve the security of all countries involved. This article’s proposal for a joint NATO-Russian early-warning radar located in central Russia provides genuine security benefits for all countries, improves strategic stability, and involves potential industrial partnerships, which ought to be of interest to Russian semiconductor firms.
Seeking to break the logjam in U.S.-Russian efforts to cooperate on missile defense deployments in Europe, a group of retired senior national security officials released a report in February offering an approach to building greater confidence between Moscow and NATO.
A year-long U.S.-Russian effort to find ways to cooperate on European missile defense ground to a halt in November and December, just months before the NATO summit in Chicago this May and in the midst of presidential election seasons in both countries.
After an extended delay, the U.S. Department of State announced on Sept. 2 that Turkey had agreed to host an early-warning radar as a key part of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, the Obama administration’s plan for missile defense in Europe.