WASHINGTON, Nov. 29 (UPI) -- Russian leaders have shrugged aside the latest U.S. proposals on ballistic missile defense.
The chief of the Russian General Staff, four-star Army Gen. Yury Baluyevsky, complained Wednesday that the latest U.S. proposals presented to Russia about American plans to build a ballistic missile defense interceptor base in Central Europe had nothing significantly new in them, the Moscow newspaper Kommersant reported Wednesday.
"The dog is barking but the caravan is moving. It appears we haven't been understood in the end. What definite proposals are you talking about if we have got from the United States written proposals on missile defense that the United States was arranging, is arranging and will be arranging a positional missile defense area in Europe, while Russia is taken as a free supplement to it," Baluyevsky said.
Baluyevsky has over the past year and a half been in the forefront of the tough-talking Russian leaders who have remained adamantly opposed to the Bush administration's BMD Euro-base plans. Kommersant described him as "emphatic" in his comments.
There has been no hint of division in the Kremlin on Russia's assessment of the BMD base plan. Top generals led by Baluyevsky and the diplomats led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have backed President Vladimir Putin in remaining adamantly opposed to them.
Lavrov said this week that, far from opening up a new avenue of dialog with Russia, the latest U.S. proposals on missile defense offered by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert Gates reduced the prospects for any compromise agreement on the issue.
Lavrov claimed the latest U.S. proposals were actually a retreat from an agreement reached between the two sides in Moscow last month. However, the U.S. Department of Defense said Thursday that there had been no change whatsoever in the U.S. position since the October talks, when the Russians at the time appeared at least more receptive.
Britain to test PAAMS next year
Britain's own ballistic missile defense system will start its long-awaited major test program next year, Aviation Week reported Wednesday.
Britain has not shown the same sense of urgency in developing its own missile defense programs compared with such nations as India and Israel, both of which face much more immediate nuclear missile threats. However, Britain's Principal Anti-Air Missile System has now reached the last stages of preparation for what Aviation Week said would be end-to-end testing scheduled to start in France in 2008.
The journal said the testing would be carried out on the French Mediterranean coast at the naval base of Toulon and that a Longbow platform for it had already been sent there to the French missile launch test center near the Ile du Levant. The testing is expected to take about a year and to be completed in 2009, the report said.
In a sign of the great defense industry integration that has been achieved between major Western European military establishments and their defense industries, Aviation Week noted that the British government had awarded the testing contract earlier to the French Defense Ministry.
"The firing campaign will benefit from all the experience gained from de-risking activities undertaken to date at MBDA's PAAMS integration facility in Bristol and the Eskmeals development facility in Cumbria -- in northern England -- the integration and trials carried out on Longbow and the integration with the ship combat system carried out at the BAE Systems' Maritime Integration & Support Center at Portsmouth," Nick Neale, manager of the British PAAMS project, said in a statement quoted in the report.
Aviation Week noted that France and Italy had both invested heavily in the success of the PAAMS project and were committed to buying it, but that they would use a different configuration from the one currently being constructed on British Type 45 destroyers.
The journal said Britain was relying on its own BAE Systems Sampson multifunction radar, the PAAMS(S). However, France's Horizon frigates and Italy's Orizzonte frigates would be equipped with the European Multifunction Phased Array Radar made by Selex and also known as the PAAMS(E), which concluded its own final qualification trials in May.
Aviation Week said MBDA was the prime contractor for PAAMS and that the system employed Aster 15 and Aster 30 missiles as BMD interceptors. Those missiles had already been put through operational trials in the Franco-Italian SAMP/T project, the ground-based equivalent of PAAMS, the report said.
The first Type 45 destroyer, the HMS Daring, has already been equipped with PAAMS, and work is under way to equip the second one, HMS Dauntless, with it too, the report said.
Hicks says Seoul may upgrade Aegis
The head of the U.S. Navy's Aegis ballistic missile defense program said this week he anticipates South Korea to consider buying a far-term sea-based terminal missile-defense capability in the foreseeable future, Yonhap news agency said Thursday in a report carried by the Korea Times.
More details of far-term terminal BMD capability are expected to be released next year, Rear Adm. Alan B. Hicks, program director of Aegis ballistic missile defense, said.
"Once we go more public with our far-term sea-based capability program next year, we anticipate interest by the government of South Korea on their Aegis air-defense ships to acquire that capability," he said.
Yonhap noted that in May 2007, South Korea launched its own first Aegis-equipped warship, the Sejong the Great.
Hicks also warned that North Korea and Iran remained committed trying to further develop their ballistic missile technology, worrying both their neighbors and the Untied States. "So as long as (there is) will to keep working with their motor technology in their missiles and how they would operationalize to reduce warning times, those things concern me," he said.
