Subject: Any cutoff would force the U.S. military into longer cargo flights

From: "Berta Ryan" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2007 20:07:28 +0100

The pact eliminated the deployment of Soviet and U.S. ballistic missiles of intermediate range and was a landmark step in arms control just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall and later the breakup of the Soviet Union.
The recent rise in tensions between Turkey and the United States has led the military to increase its planning for alternatives, two military officials with direct knowledge of the ongoing assessment said.
"We hope that in the process of such complex and multifaceted talks you will not be forcing forward your previous agreements with Eastern European countries," Putin said.
A spokesman for Putin, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a conference call that "some of them are quite interesting and the Russian side will start examining this proposal."
"The principal thing to which we did not agree today is the deployment of anti-missile elements which have an anti-Russian character and which are to be placed in Europe," he said.
The Pentagon plans to install 10 missile interceptors in Poland, linked to a missile tracking radar in the Czech Republic. The Pentagon says the system will provide some protection in Europe and beyond for long-range missiles launched from Iran, but Russia believes the system is a step toward undermining the deterrent value of its nuclear arsenal.
"We may decide someday to put missile defense systems on the moon, but before we get to that we may lose a chance for agreement because of you implementing your own plans," he told Rice and Gates in Russian, according to an Associated Press translation.
Russian President Vladimir Putin says any treaty must be "universal in nature."
Putin set the tone early on when he hosted the pair and their Russian counterparts at his country home outside Moscow and delivered a stern rebuff to U.S. plans to push ahead with establishing missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic.
Turkey has threatened such action after congressional moves to declare that the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in World War I was "genocide."
U.S. military planners quietly have stepped up a review of alternatives in case the Turkish government restricts U.S. access to Turkish airspace or cuts off access to the air base at Incirlik, Turkey, CNN has learned.
But he stressed: "It will take some time before we are able to make public our estimation."
U.S. Air Force planes prepare to take off in November 2001 from the air base at Incirlik, Turkey.
Turkey -- now a NATO member and a key U.S. ally in the war on terror -- accepts Armenians were killed but calls it a massacre during a chaotic time, not an organized campaign of genocide.
Rice and Lavrov announced at a news conference after the meetings that the two sides would meet again in Washington in six months to review a "strategic framework" on evaluating and addressing the missile threat posed by countries the United States regards as rogue states, principally Iran.