The provocative folly of Poland missile defence
26/8/08; Tony Kevin served as an Australian diplomat in Moscow (1969-71), UN New York (1973-76), and as Australian Ambassador in Poland (1991-1994).
Triggered by events in Georgia, the US and Polish governments have agreed that Poland will host an American base for ten interceptor missiles designed to shoot down a limited number of ballistic missiles that, the US claims, might one day be launched against NATO Europe by a future ‘rogue state’ adversary such as Iran. The system, on Poland’s Baltic coast (and Russia’s doorstep), to be manned by 100 US military personnel, is expected to operate by 2012. The Czech government had previously agreed to host a complementary tracking radar system. Separately, the US will provide Poland with advanced air defence systems, unrelated to the shooting down of ballistic missiles. The US proposed giving Poland such a modest anti-missile system two years ago, but Poland hesitated in the face of strong opposition and retaliatory threats from Moscow, which from the beginning believed that it was the true target of the proposed system. Such prototype systems — already being installed in some NATO countries — are politically and technically controversial. Democrat critics in the US Congress last year condemned such ‘high-risk, immature programs’.