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US says missile plan to collide with treaty

WASHINGTON - President Bush wants to move fast to put the beginnings of a missile defense system on ships, airplanes, and possibly satellites in an aggressive deployment program that could within months collide head-on with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, administration officials said yesterday.

''We are on a collision course'' with the ABM treaty, which prohibits such defensive systems, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an often acrimonious hearing of the Senate Armed Forces Committee. ''We have either got to withdraw from it or replace it.''

Wolfowitz said the administration's testing plan ''will inevitably bump up against treaty restrictions and limitations ... in months, rather than in years.''

The Pentagon plans to notify Congress next week that it intends to clear trees in August for a missile defense site at Fort Greely, Alaska. That would allow it to begin building a test site there next year and have five to 10 silo-based missile interceptors in place by 2003.

Administration officials fanned out across Washington to promote the missile defense system yesterday as the US military prepared a fourth and politically critical test of a ground-based system, scheduled for late tomorrow or early Sunday.

While Bush and his national security team have made no secret of their desire to defend the United States and allies against ballistic missile threats from so-called rogue nations, senior officials said for the first time yesterday that the ABM treaty would not hinder their push to build defenses against a missile attack on the ground, at sea, and in space.

The goal, the officials said, is to be able to attack missiles in the boost or launch phase, in midcourse, or toward the end of flight - although none of the technology has been proven to work yet.

The administration signaled that it will confront the stiff opposition to any missile defense system from Russian leaders, some European allies, and many in Congress who fear that the system could destroy the architecture of arms treaties built during the Cold War.

Several Senate Democrats, led by Carl Levin of Michigan, voiced impatience with Wolfowitz and demanded clarification on how the administration's plan would affect the ABM treaty.

Senior administration officials said yesterday that while elements of those treaties were worth preserving, they do not address some of today's threats. The dangers include small arsenals of missiles from a handful of nations ''that would blackmail us from coming to the aid of friends and allies,'' said national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

''We want very much to move cooperatively with the Russians and other interested parties beyond the ABM treaty to a new strategic framework that is more appropriate to the present day,'' Rice said at the National Press Club.

Addressing the threat, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told a Frontiers of Freedom Institute forum that ''even a trained ape can figure out that over the coming period more people are going to have exceedingly powerful weapons, weapons more powerful than ever in the history of the world, biological weapons, nuclear weapons, chemical weapons.''

Rice and other US officials said Russian leaders understand that the Bush administration wants to move ahead with the testing of different types of missile defenses, but Russia's initial reaction was extremely negative.

''Russia, as well as many other countries, believes that a unilateral withdrawal of the United States from the ABM treaty would lead to the destruction of strategic stability, a new powerful spiral of the arms race, particularly in space, and the development of means of overcoming the national missile defense system,'' Vladimir Rushailo, head of the Russian Security Council, said in Belarus.

Arms control specialists said President Vladimir V. Putin and other Russian leaders would not go along with such an extensive missile defense plan.

''It is very difficult to see a revision of the ABM treaty in the abstract for a system that is so multifaceted,'' said Celeste A. Wallander, a director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a centrist Washington think tank. ''The Russians clearly are not willing to reach any kind of agreement on the ABM treaty that meets the ambitions of the Bush administration.''

Nevertheless, Wolfowitz said the administration is optimistic about reaching a deal with the Russians ''because the Cold War is over, the Soviet Union is gone, Russia is not our enemy, we are no longer locked in a posture of Cold War ideological antagonism.''

''They have to say that,'' responded John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington defense policy group. ''What else are they going to say - that everyone on the planet knows we have taken leave of our senses?''

Rumsfeld said that the United States would not violate terms of the treaty and that he believed the United States and Russia would find a way to ''have a mutual understanding.'' ''No one should want to behave in a way that would give Russia an incentive to not find a way to mutually move beyond the treaty,'' he said.

If the two sides do not reach an agreement, Rumsfeld said, the United States would enact a provision in the treaty allowing either side to withdraw in six months.

Bush and Putin are set to discuss the missile defense plan at an economic summit next week in Italy, and probably will talk about it at least twice more this year. Last week, Putin proposed that the five major nuclear powers - the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China - open talks aimed at eliminating 10,000 warheads in the next seven years.

Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, said the Alaska test facilities also would make use of early warning radar at bases on Shemya Island in Alaska. He described an accelerated period of testing, involving as many as 17 tests over the next 14 months. This weekend's test will be the fourth since October 1999.

In the first three tests, a ''kill vehicle'' succeeded in hitting a dummy warhead on just one occasion. In the coming test, a dummy missile and a decoy balloon will be fired from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and an interceptor launched 4,800 miles away on the Marshall Islands will attempt to hit the fake missile.

John Donnelly can be reached by e-mail at donnelly@globe.com.

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