State official: Missile-defense move not about Russia

The Obama administration's new missile-defense scheme was not designed to appease Russia, but if the Russians like it, that would be a great side benefit, the State Department's top arms-control official said Wednesday.

Ellen O. Tauscher, under secretary of state for arms control and international security, defended plans to overhaul Bush administration design for missile defense in Eastern Europe in a speech today at the Atlantic Council, a transatlantic-themed Washington think tank.

"There was no attempt to curry favor with the Russian government or to secure some kind of tradeoff in our negotiations for a START follow-on treaty," said Tauscher, responding to mostly conservative critics who have tried to frame the Obama missile-defense plans as a unilateral concession to the Russians.

"Now, if, as a consequence of the change in the direction of our European-based BMD plans, Moscow now understands that our future BMD deployments will not pose a threat to Russia's strategic deterrent, and thus is now open to cooperation, including in BMD, then that is an added benefit to our initiative and we should embrace it," she added, referring to ballistic missile defense.

Tauscher said that the Obama administration is seriously interested in missile defense cooperation with Russia, including taking up the Russian offer to share data from the Russian-leased, Azerbaijani-owned early warning radar at Qabala, and the early-warning radar at Armavir in southern Russia.

Tauscher and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov will cochair the U.S.-Russia Bilateral Presidential Commission's working group on Arms Control and International Security, one of the committees announced after the July summit meant to shore up relations on a host of issues, in Moscow next week.

Cooperation with Poland and the Czech Republic, which were supposed to have housed the Bush administration's missile-defense infrastructure, will continue in a new form, Tauscher said, but she acknowledged the rushed announcement of the decision may have exacerbated those countries' angst over the changes.

"Now I will be the first to admit, since I had to jump on a plane at the last minute to fly to Warsaw and Prague, that the rollout could have been handled better," she said.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is also scheduled to travel to Moscow this month and Vice President Joseph Biden will go to Warsaw and Prague, his office has announced.