To block US proposals for building missile defenses in Europe, Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised the White House in June with a counteroffer to let the US use one of the Kremlin's most secret early-warning radars.
That Russian radar, in Azerbaijan, a neighbor of Iran, has since been a central focus of negotiations between Washington and Moscow. But much about it had remained mysterious.
Now, the first US military officer to see the Russian radar said on Friday that he had come away from the visit with three significant impressions.
The radar is huge, almost twice the size of a similar US system. Despite its reliance on outdated vacuum-tube technology, the system is extremely able as an early warning radar scanning the skies over the Middle East.
But the officer, Major General Patrick O'Reilly, deputy director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, also said that the Russian early warning system would not be an adequate replacement for the US radar proposed for the Czech Republic, which is designed for very precise tracking and focusing on targets.
After Putin's offer this summer of access to the radar, O'Reilly led a six-member team to the site in Azerbaijan in mid-September, the first time US military officers had been allowed inside one of Russia's most secret installations.
Despite the system's older technology, "I was impressed by what I saw," O'Reilly said. "It would be a false impression to dismiss the capabilities they have. They just chose another way of achieving it. It is an excellent radar for the case of early warning."
The radar has been well maintained and upgraded since its design in the 1970s and construction in the 1980s, prompting O'Reilly to report back to Washington that the Russian system offers an extremely desirable ability for early warning of a ballistic missile attack from a country like Iran.
That analysis prompted the US to invite Russia to link the radar to a US and NATO missile defense system in Europe, which would include a radar system in the Czech Republic and 10 missile interceptors in Poland.
But O'Reilly stressed that the Russian radar was not designed to perform the same function as the US radar proposed for the Czech Republic.
The US radar is intended to track specific targets and then precisely guide an interceptor to destroy a warhead, something the Russian radar cannot do, since it was designed to scan larger areas but with less detail, he said.
O'Reilly's comments come as Congress is poised to cut US$85 million from the proposed budget for the European missile defense system until Poland and the Czech Republic agree to accommodate the sites. Bush administration officials had hoped for agreements by the end of this year, but now they are not expected before next year. The Polish and Czech parliaments must approve the agreements.
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