OREANDA-NEWS. October 30, 2009. Question: The Americans, having foregone deployment of their missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic, are now developing new plans. The new system will be mobile, with both sea and land-based anti-missile missiles. Do these new plans bother Moscow?

Sergey Ryabkov: We must look into them more thoroughly. Of course, we have commended the Obama administration’s decision to forgo deployment of elements of a missile defense system in the form in which it was conceived under the Bush administration. But the adjusted US approaches to the development of missile defense systems imply that they will be highly mobile, highly adaptable to the situation and capable of rapid deployment in different areas. It is proposed to use a “network approach,” which includes combining various radars, sensors, interceptors, and so on into a single system. This only strengthens our notion that it is about constructing a global missile defense model that will be used, as US representatives claim, to protect not only its own territory and troops, but also their allies.

The future quantitative and geographic parameters of this new missile defense system are not entirely clear to us. We are having a dialogue with the American side on this theme. We approach it very seriously and are grateful to the US partners for their equally serious approach to discussing these issues with us. But this equation has much more unknowns than knowns. There is to be a complex and lengthy discussion before we can draw any conclusions.

Question: Russia links the strategic defense theme to the state of strategic offensive arms. Our diplomacy is even trying to write provisions about this relationship into a new treaty on strategic offensive arms. This has to be done until December, when the previous treaty expires and when it is desirable to sign a new treaty.

Sergey Ryabkov: A common understanding of what is strategic stability has long existed between Moscow and Washington. The relationship you have mentioned was always evident to both our and US experts. We cannot treat strategic offensive arms as a class of weapons that exists all by itself. Means of countering this type of arms are as an integral component of strategic stability as are these means themselves. Given a highly developed, advanced missile defense system the question arises: To what extent can strategic offensive capabilities be then considered as a means to assuredly guarantee the security of a country altogether?

In the previous, confrontational era, military experts and political leaders on both sides comprehended that, in the absence of such a relationship, an arms race was bound to occur, winding up in a deadlock. So the ABM Treaty was, in fact, the first major treaty between Moscow and Washington to govern relations in the realm of strategic stability.

Time passed, and due to a variety of reasons the previous US administration took decision to withdraw from the ABM Treaty unilaterally. Now the possibilities for reducing strategic offensive arms are being discussed in a situation where there is no conceptual support for these discussions in the form of the ABM Treaty. But just because the circumstances have developed that way, the objective relationship between the two components of this platform of strategic stability has not disappeared anywhere! Not to recognize this is wrong. Otherwise we will find ourselves in a very flawed situation, that of strategic uncertainty.

Question: Where do you see the flawedness here?

Sergey Ryabkov: What’ll it be worth to have reductions if at some stage one side acquires a considerable strategic missile defense capability? If we are seriously talking about our goal being to bolster global security and progress towards nuclear disarmament, as stipulated in Article 6 of the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, we cannot ignore that relationship. In our future agreements with the United States, we need to find forms of its reflection consistent with the requirements of the new times.

Question: Journalists put forward the theory of a possible tradeoff: Russia toughens its stand on Iran, as the United States wants, and the Americans, in turn, change their plans for missile defense. I am not a supporter of such theories, and then the Foreign Ministry also refuted them, but still the speculation was there...

Sergey Ryabkov: Such deals are impossible. This is not even from science fiction. We always made this point. These are different things, different values. We cannot agree with the Americans about how real the need for missile defenses will be in a certain number of years. On these grounds, we ran up a big backlog with the previous administration. It’s no accident Russia so insistently raises the question of conducting a joint assessment of missile proliferation challenges in the world. That’s where we need to start! If there is no common vision of whence a threat may come from, how then can we talk about cooperation on issues related to parrying this threat?

Question: Are you managing to convince the Americans of all this? For in parallel you need to determine the quantity of warheads and their delivery vehicles and to solve other issues. And December is not far off…

Sergey Ryabkov: This is something we’re actively working on. Time is running out, but we can certainly meet the deadline, and both sides are very keen to do that.