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Tauscher: Tests eyed for missile interceptors

Don’t start digging just yet.

The U.S. won’t be sending missile interceptors to Poland anytime soon, two House members told European government officials during mid-December meetings.

Rep. Ellen Tauscher, who heads the House Armed Services strategic forces subcommittee, told European leaders that President-elect Barack Obama will insist on testing and certification for missile interceptors before he will let them be deployed in underground silos in Poland.

Tauscher, D-Calif., and Rep. Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., delivered that message while visiting officials in Warsaw, Prague and Moscow this week, congressional aides said.

In essence, they said, Obama will comply with legislation Congress approved this fall to require testing and certification that the interceptors have “a high probability of working in an operationally effective manner” before they can be deployed.

In Prague, Tauscher and Lamborn met with Czech Deputy Prime Minister Alexandr Vondra. They said in a written statement Thursday that they told him Obama “would be guided by the legislative conditions that were imposed by the Congress, particularly the requirement to fully test the long-range interceptors.”

Testing and certification are expected to take at least several years. So far, none of the two-stage interceptors intended for the European site has yet been built, let alone tested.

Placing missile interceptors in Poland and a missile-detecting radar in the Czech Republic has been a high priority for President George W. Bush, who maintains that the missile defense system is to protect Europe and the U.S. against attacks by long-range missiles fired from Iran.

But Iran is not expected to have missiles that can reach Europe or the U.S. until at least 2015, according to the Arms Control Association in Washington.

Meanwhile, the prospect of missile interceptors in Poland has provoked outrage and threats by Russia to deploy medium-range missiles on Poland’s border.

Tauscher and Lamborn said they made it clear to Czech and Polish officials that Obama’s policies on missile defense will be guided by U.S. national security interests, and not by “external threats.”

But they also stressed that defenses against Iranian short-range and medium-range missiles, a threat that exists today, is more pressing than defense against a possible future long-range threat.

The radar station planned for the Czech Republic could be “an important element” in defending against short and medium-range Iranian missiles, they said.

For the past two years Congress has trimmed spending on long-range, ground-based missile defenses and transferred the money to medium-range and short-range missile defense systems: the Army’s Theater High Altitude Area Defense and the Navy’s Aegis system.