WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- A top Pentagon official said Tuesday the United States plans to deploy a missile defense system in Eastern Europe because Iran will have an ICBM around 2015.
"I think the judgment we have is that the threat starts to mature in around 2015, and one of the reasons we're moving ahead now is we want to have a capability in place to meet that threat in that timeline that it's developing on," Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Eric Edelman said.
The system will include 10 ground-based interceptors in Poland and an X-band radar on the Czech Republic. It will cost the United States billions; the 2008 budget includes roughly $1.7 billion to begin buying and deploying the missiles alone.
The missiles, which would be part of the United States' nascent national missile defense system now deployed in Alaska and Canada, are necessary to protect the United States' eastern coast from an Iranian or North Korean ICBM, neither of which has yet been developed.
But in meetings last week in Europe and Tuesday at a Pentagon press conference Edelman insisted this system is not about protecting the United States.
"This is not a capability we need to defend the United States," Edelman said. "It's a capability ... we believe will provide coverage for the United States; this does, however, provide us with a capability, if we have a third site in Europe, to extend protection to our fielded forces in those European countries that would be covered by this and to defend our friends and allies as well."
Parts of Eastern Europe are already within range of Iran's intermediate Shahab-3 missile, a threat that theater missile defenses are designed to defend against. Edelman said NATO is working on the shorter-range missile threat.
Russia has strong objections to the project. Edelman said its opposition will not dissuade the United States from pursuing the deployment of the system.
