ABM Move May Bring Instability, Russia Says

The United States’ decision to withdraw from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia could threaten international stability by freeing other nations to end peace agreements, Russian Defense Minister Sergei B. Ivanov said Monday.

After a meeting with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Ivanov said the move would not unbalance U.S.-Russian relations. But he added that it could imperil a broad array of treaty agreements by undermining the spirit of international trust and cooperation on which they are based.

“Russia is not concerned or afraid regarding its military security, but we’re very much concerned how other countries behave. . . . Logically, if one country doesn’t abide, why should we?” Ivanov said in a brief joint news conference after a two-hour talk with Rumsfeld near NATO headquarters here.

Having met five or six times with Rumsfeld this year, Ivanov said, he saw the ABM decision coming. But “we still believe it was a mistake,” he said, reiterating Russian President Vladimir V. Putin’s assessment.

The Bush administration’s argument for abandoning the ABM treaty is that without the ability to develop a missile shield, the United States and other nations remain vulnerable to rogue forces capable of launching nuclear missiles or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. To protect against this, Pentagon officials would have to conduct missile tests that would violate the treaty, Rumsfeld said.

“We lost thousands in the United States in the attack on the Pentagon and on the World Trade Center,” he told soldiers at a base near Afghanistan on Sunday. “To the extent that terrorists and terrorist organizations get their hands on weapons of mass destruction, as each of you know, we’re talking about tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands” of potential victims.

Ivanov and Rumsfeld noted that the United States and Russia have agreed to reduce strategic offensive nuclear weapons, but Ivanov added that there is “no legal mechanism” to enforce that agreement.

Ivanov also used the occasion to seek U.S. support for Russia’s effort to have a greater say in North Atlantic Treaty Organization affairs. En route to Brussels from Tbilisi, Georgia, Rumsfeld compared Russia to France, which unlike the other 18 members of NATO does not participate in alliance military activities.

Rumsfeld’s visit was his second to NATO headquarters after a 25-year absence. In his final NATO meeting during his 18-month tenure as defense secretary during the Gerald Ford administration, there were 15 NATO nations and they were debating admitting Spain into the alliance.

Urging NATO members to refashion the alliance to face new threats in a prescient address in July, as Al Qaeda members were allegedly planning the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, Rumsfeld said, “We know, for example, that as an alliance of democracies, our open borders and open societies make it easy and inviting for terrorists to strike at our people where they live, work and play.”