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WASHINGTON, Dec 12: US President George W. Bush informed leaders of Congress at a weekly breakfast meeting on Wednesday of his decision to withdraw from the ABM treaty, Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle said.
Daschle, speaking after the White House meeting with Bush, did not specify when the president intended to announce his intention but said he was uneasy about the decision.
“I am very concerned of the implications of pulling out of the ABM treaty,” Daschle said, warning that it could “undermine the fragile coalition we have with our allies (and) complicate relations with Russia and China.
“I think we have to be very concerned about that.”
Bush administration officials said on Tuesday the president would decide soon on the future of the treaty, which officials have called an outdated relic of the Cold War.
Efforts to strike a deal with Moscow to revise or replace the treaty have not succeeded.
Diplomatic sources in Moscow said Russia had been informed that the decision would be made official on Thursday, according to the Interfax news agency.
“Unfortunately the Russians knew before the (congressional) leaders did,” Daschle said, clearly annoyed that the White House had not alerted Congress to his decision earlier.
Three other key Congress members attended the breakfast — Senator Trent Lott, Republican minority leader, Republican House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert, and leader of the minority House Democrats, Representative Richard Gephardt.
RUSSIAN MPS: Top Russian lawmakers said on Wednesday that Moscow was free to stock up on nuclear warheads to Cold War-era levels following a US decision to scrap the 1972 ABM treaty in the face of Kremlin efforts to save the disarmament pact.
Deputies argued that Russia now had little incentive to live up to other disarmament commitments and would likely rely on heavy multiple warhead missiles that offered a cheap alternative for preserving nuclear parity with the United States.
“Now Russia’s hands are untied concerning START I and START II,” said State Duma lower house of parliament foreign affairs committee chairman Dmitry Rogozin, referring to two key strategic arms reduction treaties.
Russia will opt to “preserve and develop its heavy strategic rockets which will be loaded with multiple warheads, something that had been banned by START II,” Rogozin told Echo Moscow radio.
Interfax cited Russian government sources as saying that Moscow has been notified that a US decision to pull out of the treaty in six months could be formally announced as early as Thursday.
US press reports of the Bush decision came on a Russian public holiday and officialdom here met the news with stony silence. One government source told Interfax that diplomats “would not dramatize the situation and will wait to see how events unfold.”
But Russian parliamentarians argued that Bush’s decision firmly proved that the interests of Moscow and Washington — which have appeared to narrow since the Sept 11 terror strikes on the United States — could never coincide.
“The trust in our relations with America, which had recently improved, has certain limits and we have to keep that in mind,” said the Duma’s deputy speaker Vladimir Lukin, who has served as Russia’s ambassador to Washington.
Citing a threat to US security from “rogue states” like North Korea and Iran, Bush made a missile defence shield a key plank of his foreign policy even though such a system would require a major revision of ABM.—AFP
