Powell: U.S. Rethinking Arms Treaty

.c The Associated Press

WASHINGTON (June 17) - The United States will abandon a landmark arms control agreement with Russia when it concludes that the curbs on missile defense are blocking U.S. technology, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Sunday.

That point has not been reached, he said, as the Bush administration weighs its options in search of a shield against missile attack.

Powell also said Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to keep talking to the administration about missile defense aspirations. ``There may be opportunities to move forward,'' Powell said on ``Fox News Sunday,'' a day after Bush's first meeting with Putin, in Slovenia.

Putin renewed his opposition to a national missile defense program, which is outlawed by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union.

Powell said the agreement was reached in a different era. ``We cannot allow its constraints'' to bind American technology, he said.

The treaty, a product of the Cold War, is ``designed to keep us from moving in this direction'' of a missile defense system. That era ``no longer exists,'' Powell said on ABC's ``This Week.''

``If there is no ABM treaty tomorrow, there is no nation that's going to run out and start making nuclear weapons,'' he said, adding that the United States has made it clear that ``we are going to go forward with missile defense.''

Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the treaty ``belongs to a relationship of implacable hostility between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so it's time to move on.''

The president wants ``to do that cooperatively,'' Rice said on NBC's ``Meet the Press.'' ``We've launched extensive consultations and we're making progress on the intellectual argument.''

On another topic, Powell said the two countries would hold talks on ``tracking down'' Russian companies and scientists who are assisting Iran develop weapons.

``Russia should see it is more in their interest than ours'' to stop weapons proliferation, Powell said.

One way to accomplish that, he said, is to step up programs designed to give Russian scientists an incentive to remain at home. ``We can do more,'' Powell said, without providing any details.

``We have to keep talking to them about this to make sure we are of a unified mind,'' he said.

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I couldn't agree more.

If Bush has done nothing else right...,
He has put the right people on the Team.
Namely Powell and Rice.

Del [:)]