Moscow condemns U.S. missile defense expansion, likening it to Reagan's 'Star Wars' and calling for legally binding space arms control.
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Trump's 'Iron Dome' Plan: Russia Warns |
The decision by US President Donald Trump to create an American version of the Israeli 'Iron Dome' missile defense system is a step toward the weaponization of space, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova has stated.
An executive order signed by Trump earlier this week allows for the development of advanced missile defenses, including the creation of "space-based interceptors," the diplomat told reporters on Friday.
We perceive this as yet more proof that Washington is committed to the goal of transforming space into a field of armed struggle, war, and deployment of weapons," Zakharova said.
This would "completely discredit" the previous US administration's initiative to develop "certain norms, rules and principles" of behavior in space, and would violate the ban on testing direct-ascent and satellite-killer missiles, she added.
The decisions taken by Trump, according to Zakharova, "demonstrate the intention of Washington to actively develop and expand deeply destabilizing military programs," building up missile defenses to a scale "comparable with Reagan's 'Star Wars.'
President Ronald Reagan had envisioned a missile shield as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative, or SDI, a Cold War program nicknamed 'Star Wars' at the time. Reagan's proposal touched off an arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.
But it never managed to develop the space-based weapons he wanted, the tensions eventually waned with several arms-control treaties, and Washington has since abrogated nearly all of those, from the ABM treaty banning strategic missile defenses to the INF treaty limiting short- and intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
The program presented by Trump is "openly directed" at devaluing the Russian and Chinese strategic deterrents, which "will not contribute to reducing tensions or improving the situation in the strategic sphere, including creating a basis for a fruitful dialogue on strategic armaments," Zakharova said on Friday.
Such dangerous ideas vividly demonstrate how timely Russia's proposals are to work out legally binding instruments for preventing an arms race in outer space, including mechanisms to prohibit the deployment of space-based weapons, she added.
The Jan. 27 executive orders instructs the Pentagon to devise a strategy for defending the U.S. territory from "ballistic, hypersonic, advanced cruise missiles, and other next-generation aerial attacks from peer, near-peer, and rogue adversaries" through a multi-layered missile shield.
Such an "Iron Dome"-a name cribbed from the Israeli short-range missile defense program-would consist of "development and deployment of proliferated space-based interceptors" capable of knocking out an incoming ballistic missiles during their boost phase, among other undefined capabilities "to defeat missile attacks before launch," per the text of the order.