A Study Of American’s European Missile Defense System

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the ABM Treaty which is seen as the cornerstone of global strategic stability faced with the challenges of revision and withdrawal from US. The terrorist attacks which happened on September 11,2001 supplied George.W.Bush an opportunity to withdraw from the treaty. On December 13,2001,US announced its retirement from the ABM Treaty,which eliminated the obstacle for the development of the missile defense system.Up to now, the US missile defense system has experienced two periods of deployment. During the Bush administration, missile defense system was deployed not only in Alaska and California, but also planed to deployed in Poland and Czech.During the Obama administration, they have a new plan which named EPAA, the plan of EPAA will be united with the European missile defense system,which NATO as the main body, US as the leader. The controversy between US and Russia has continued since the system deployed. Deploying the system in Europe is to deal with the missile threat from Iran, said US. However, Russia argues that the statement of US is deceptive, the real purpose is aimed at Russia.In order to explore the real aim of US, this paper analyzed it in detail from two perspectives. From the perspective of power, the geographic location and the existing capability of the US missile defense system, makes Russia’s missiles can be realized by its multi-layer interception,which poses a direct and real threat to Russia. At the same time,this paper assesses the capability of Iran’s ballistic missile, proves that Iran does not have enough power to threat US. For the intention side, according to the suggestions which US refused, such as US-Russia shared the Qabala Radar Station in Azerbaijan, or the suggestion that Europe be divided into two sectors, with NATO taking responsibility for providing missile defenses for one and Russia for the other,or Russia asked for legally binding “military-technical” guarantees from US and NATO, which proves the real intention of US missile defense system is against Russia.