WASHINGTON Ñ The United States hopes to complete missile defense cooperation accords with its allies in the Middle East and Asia over the next year.

U.S. officials said the Bush administration will launch cooperation efforts with such countries as Israel, Japan and Turkey after Washington concludes an effort to reach an agreement with Russia to revise the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

The revisions would allow the establishment of a U.S.-sponsored missile defense umbrella.

"Sooner, not later," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. "I wouldn't be surprised if we worried our way through it this year. We have a lot of tests coming up that would begin to bump up against the treaty, and we're going to be working with the Russians immediately ahead."

U.S. officials said an obstacle to cooperation is the absence of a missile defense architecture. They said the Pentagon would seek to draft such an architecture in fiscal 2002, which begins in October.

Rumsfeld said in a television interview on the C-Span network that Israel has expressed great interest in missile defense cooperation. Japan has also relayed its intention to participate in a U.S.-sponsored missile defense umbrella to protect against North Korean missiles.

"The Japanese are very interested in missile defense," Rumsfeld said. "They have a neighbor, a couple of neighbors that have a lot of ballistic missiles, and they've been interested in the subject and are discussing it."

U.S. officials said the missile defense umbrella would focus on threats from the Middle East and North Korea. This includes defense of Saudi Arabia and other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council.

Ian Lesser, an analyst of Western Policy Center and of Rand Corp., has authored a study that asserts that the Eastern Mediterranean region has come under threat from ballistic missiles. Lesser said this includes countries stretching from Turkey and Israel until Western Europe.

The administration plans to move ahead with missile defense even in the absence of Russian agreement to revise the ABM treaty. Officials said the treaty is extremely restrictive and Washington does not want to be accused of violating its accords.

"It explicitly prohibits us from a variety of missile defense capabilities that in fact get the missile in boost phase before all those balloons, if they have them, or multiple warheads, if they have them, have dispersed," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said. "The ABM Treaty prevents us from developing the kinds of missile defenses that we need for our territory, for our allies, for our deployed forces overseas."

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