World Tribune.com

U.S. warns allies of Libyan missile threat

SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Monday, June 25, 2001

WASHINGTON Ñ The United States has offered its proposed missile defense shield to NATO allies in Europe to protect against intermediate-range missiles and nonconventional weapons from nearby North Africa. U.S. sources said the administration warned NATO allies in southern Europe that the most likely threat comes from Libya.

The European response has been largely receptive, the officials said. They said Italy and Spain have quietly welcomed the U.S. missile shield offer.

Spain is said to have offered to station a naval vessel off the Libyan coast to detect missile launches from the North African country, Middle East Newsline reported. A Spanish government decision is expected next week.

Libya, the officials said, has been developing an intermediate-range missile capability with the help of North Korea. A shipment of North Korean missile components headed for Libya was seized at London's Heathrow airport in late 1999.

But U.S. officials said the missile shield would not be developed to merely focus on the Libyan threat. Instead, the shield would be designed to respond to a range of threats, including those from Iran, Iraq and North Korea. In each region, the United States would work with allies to develop missile defense capabilities.

The Madrid-based El Pais daily said Thursday that U.S. and Spanish defense officials had discussed the plan for the monitoring of Libya during a meeting in Washington last month. The newspaper said Madrid would use the U.S. Aegis radar system on four of Spain's F-100 frigates.

The Aegis is said to be capable of detecting any launch in a range of 600 kilometers. U.S. ships would deploy the interceptors required to foil any Libyan missile attack.

"The United States needs to focus on the capabilities we need rather than specific threat scenarios or specific enemies," a senior U.S. defense official said.

Administration officials said Europe's help is vital in launching the U.S. missile shield. They said the anti-missile project has become a priority for President George Bush.

"The world is changing, and unless we change we will find ourselves facing new and daunting threats we did not expect and which we will be unprepared to meet," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. "Our lack of defenses against ballistic missiles creates incentives for missile proliferation which Ñ combined with the development of nuclear, chemical and particularly biological weapons of mass destruction -- could give future adversaries the incentive to try to hold our populations hostage to terror and blackmail." Tripoli is said to have fired a missile toward Italy in 1986. The missile fell way short of its target.

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