Rice placates Russia about missile plans

WASHINGTON — Bush administration officials tried Wednesday to tamp down Russian concerns, voiced in strikingly harsh terms, over U.S. plans to base missile defenses in Eastern Europe.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the missile defense proposal, which calls for deploying 10 interceptors in Poland and radar in the Czech Republic, was solely intended to counter the possible development of long-range Iranian missiles.

"I think everybody understands that with a growing Iranian missile threat, which is quite pronounced, that there need to be ways to deal with that problem," she said, adding that the system would not "diminish Russia's deterrent of thousands of warheads."

The debate escalated this week when the Russian missile commander, Gen. Nikolai Y. Solovtsov, threatened to target Russian weapons on states in Eastern Europe that might join the program.

"If the government of Poland, the Czech Republic and other countries make this decision — and I think mutual consultations that have been held and will be held will allow avoiding this — the strategic missile troops will be able to have those facilities as targets," he said.

And on Wednesday, the Russian foreign minister, Sergei V. Lavrov, who has had a strained relationship with Rice, was quoted in Rossiiskaya Gazeta, the Russian state newspaper, contradicting the U.S. position.

"We must acknowledge that these objects are fully suitable to intercept missiles fired from Russian territory," he said.

His colleague, the departing Russian defense minister, Sergei B. Ivanov, has said that Russia easily could overwhelm the U.S. defenses with a far cheaper system of countermeasures to blind or confuse an anti-missile system.

During a stopover in Brussels on Wednesday on his way to Moscow, President Bush's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, said a missile defense system against Iran "is a reasonable thing to do, it's something Europe ought to be interested in, it's something that Russia ought to be interested in." Iran might even decide not to try to build long-range missiles once the system was in place, he suggested.

Ambassador Victoria Nuland, the U.S. representative to NATO, said Russia had no cause to express surprise, as representatives from Moscow and the European allies were briefed regularly on the project over the past year.