Poland and U.S. sign shield deal

By Gabriela Baczynska and David Alexander

WARSAW (Reuters) - The United States and Poland signed a deal on Wednesday to station parts of a U.S. missile defense shield on Polish soil, drawing a sharp response from Moscow.

The deal is seen as certain to aggravate tensions between Russia and the West already strained by Moscow's military intervention in Georgia.

The 10 interceptor rockets in Poland, along with a radar complex in the Czech Republic, will form the European part of a global system Washington says will be able to shoot down missiles from "rogue" states or groups such as al Qaeda.

"This is an agreement that will establish a missile defense site here in Poland that will help us to deal with ... long range missiles ... from countries like Iran or North Korea," U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who signed the agreement with Poland's Radoslaw Sikorski, told reporters.

Despite U.S. assurances to the contrary, Russia sees the ballistic missile shield as a threat to its own security and some Russian politicians and generals have said Poland must be prepared for a preventive attack on the site in the future.

Rice said she understood why NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer had denounced such remarks as "pathetic rhetoric."

"What the secretary general was referring to is fulminating about how you're going to attack Poland because there are 10 interceptors aimed at long-range threats of the future from countries like Iran when you've been offered all kinds of measures to demonstrate" that the missiles are not aimed at Russia, Rice said. "(It) just borders on the bizarre."

In an interview with CNN, Rice said Russia knows NATO has a commitment and obligation to defend Poland.

"They (Russia) must know that the United States would never permit an attack on the territory of an ally under Article 5," said Rice, referring to part of the North Atlantic Treaty that says an attack on one member is considered an attack on all.

The Foreign Ministry in Moscow said later: "Russia in this case will have to react and not only through diplomatic protests."

The shield was "one of the instruments in an extremely dangerous bundle of American military projects involving the one-sided development of a global missile shield system".

A ministry statement said it would provide no protection against "imaginary Iranian danger".

POLISH SECURITY CONCERNS

The interceptors will be placed at the ex-Warsaw Pact base of Redzikowo in northern Poland, 1,360 km (800 miles) from Moscow and 300 km from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Baltic Sea coast.

Russia says Washington and Warsaw rushed through the deal as a response to its military action in Georgia. Warsaw and Washington deny this although Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has said events in Georgia show Poland's security concerns need to be taken seriously by the United States.  Continued...