In a prelude to this week's Group of Eight summit in Germany, Russian President Vladimir Putin railed against the Bush administration's plan to deploy a missile defense system in Poland and the Czech Republic. Although there are some genuine conflicts of interest between Putin's Russia and other members of the G-8, the Cold War-style clash over the antimissile system should not be one of them. This is an unnecessary fight that President George W. Bush started and Putin has exacerbated.
In military terms, Putin's talk about targeting European sites with "ballistic or cruise missiles or maybe a completely new system" was empty of meaning; missiles currently in Russia's arsenal can already be directed at new targets within minutes. Nevertheless, Putin's loose missile talk does fit into a pattern of belligerent pronouncements not just from Moscow but also from Washington.
When it comes to Bush's insistence on siting 10 antimissile interceptors in Poland and a radar unit in the Czech Republic, the revival of Cold War rhetoric about a balance of terror becomes particularly gratuitous - an avoidable conflict rooted in deliberate deceptions on both sides of the vanished Iron Curtain.
In a long interview over a lavish dinner with Western journalists a week ago, Putin mocked the claim that the missile defense system planned for Central Europe is needed to counter Iranian long-range missiles. About this Putin was only partly right. Iran may not now have missiles with sufficient range to reach Europe, much less the United States, but the Islamic Republic has been extending the reach of its missiles and could conceivably develop ones capable of hitting Europe by the time components of a U.S. missile defense are deployed on Polish and Czech soil.
Putin also was wrong about why Bush wants to extend to Europe the most ambitious version of U.S. missile defense - a system designed to knock out intercontinental ballistic missiles with so-called kill vehicles outside earth's atmosphere. Putin was being overly Machiavellian when he hinted that the hidden purpose of Bush's antimissile deployments in Europe was to "push us to make reciprocal steps in order to avoid further closeness of Russia and Europe." And he was being overly paranoid when he said a situation in which one side has an antimissile system and the other side does not "creates the illusion of being protected and increases the possibility of unleashing a nuclear conflict."
What Putin ought to realize - and what his nuclear specialists can tell him - is that the missile defense system Bush is deploying has a fatal flaw: Its sensors cannot discriminate between live warheads in space and easily contrived decoys. A system that doesn't work cannot be a threat to Russia, much less a shield against Iran. This is a system that has benefited only defense contractors and weakened only the American taxpayer.
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