US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dismissed support for the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty as "Cold War thinking" as he defended the Bush administration's national missile defence plan today.
Mr Rumsfeld, in Germany for an annual meeting of European and international defense leaders, said President George W. Bush's controversial proposal to protect the United States and its allies from missiles "just doesn't threaten anyone."
"That is really Cold War thinking in my view," he told reporters traveling with him to Munich when asked about the importance and future of the 1972 ABM treaty, which would forbid the US national missile defense (NMD) scheme.
"The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is a different country. That period is over in our life, why don't we get over it?" Mr Rumsfeld said.
The secretary, the first senior official from the new US administration to carry the NMD argument to Europe, made the one-day trip to the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy to hold get-acquainted talks with allied defense ministers, address NMD concerns and discuss cross-Atlantic security.
The meeting could set an early tone for cross-Atlantic security ties for Mr Bush.
Many European leaders say the ABM treaty, which Mr Rumsfeld in December called "ancient history," is a bedrock of nuclear arms control and worry that Washington will abandon it.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder reiterated his strong reservations about NMD to the conference, urging that Washington and its allies "look for joint answers to the existing and new threats to security" within the current arms control framework.
German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping also stressed during a meeting with Rumsfeld that missile defense had to be discussed in the context of the full 19-member NATO alliance, according to a senior Pentagon official.
Mr Rumsfeld said that Moscow, bitterly opposed to NMD and unwilling to change the ABM treaty, is lobbying in Western Europe and around the world to kill the US scheme.
"They know, and we know, and you know that the (US) systems that are being discussed are not in any way relevant to the Russians with their hundreds and thousands of nuclear missiles," he said.
"We are talking about systems that are able to deal with handfuls of things," Mr Rumsfeld added, stressing that the limited defense would be designed to shoot down only a few missiles launched by potential enemies such as North Korea, Iran or Iraq.
Rumsfeld declined to say whether he felt the ABM treaty should be modified, or scrapped. He said the Bush administration had no intention of "moving precipitously" on NMD without close allied consultation and talks with Moscow.