Russia-NATO joint missile defense seen years away

LONDON (Reuters) - A NATO call to study linking U.S., NATO and Russian missile defenses will face technical and security problems so numerous that some experts say the idea is unlikely to go beyond a limited exchange of early warning data.

The broad concept of joint missile defense between the West and Russia dates back at least a decade but has not progressed beyond the theoretical despite a handful of Russia-NATO command post exercises held in recent years to explore the challenges.

Friday's proposal by NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen gives the idea a political boost that may lift it into "the realm of possibility," said Andrew Nagorski, director of public policy at the East-West Institute think tank.

But making the notion a reality would require resolving a long list of military, diplomatic and technical questions that will likely take years, even in the favorable conditions of a diplomatic thaw between Moscow and the West, analysts say.

"We are years away. It's like a discussion of what we'll do once we land a man on Mars," said Jonathan Eyal, a defense expert at London's Royal United Services Institute.

Michael Elleman, a U.S.-based visiting senior fellow for missile defense at Britain's International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said work on missile cooperation would likely focus on early warning radar information exchange.

"If you want to go beyond that, it gets really tricky," Elleman said. "I'm skeptical, but I remain open-minded."

Eyal said work could only meaningfully start once Washington had executed a revamped U.S. missile shield system for Europe that would replace a planned land-based anti-missile program in Eastern Europe that had so alarmed Moscow.

"There isn't even a consensus in Europe or even in NATO over what that system should be, what technology it would apply and how extensive it would be," Eyal said.

"All you have is a tentative American decision unilaterally taken in the hope that the Europeans will follow. They will, I think, follow, but it's not obvious. And only when that decision is taken can you talk about plugging the Russians into this."

Rasmussen's suggestion follows Washington's announcement on Thursday that it would not build the anti-missile shield it had planned using facilities in the Czech Republic and Poland.

WOULD PARTNERS SHARE SPACE-BASED DATA?

The two sides have discussed technical issues most years since 2000 at expert level meetings in Moscow and command post exercises, said Christopher Langton, a senior fellow for conflict and defense diplomacy at IISS.

Discussions have included how to integrate missile defense, and whether there would be one Russian-NATO central command. Many technical issues remained to be addressed.

Elleman said handing simple radar data to a counterparty would not in itself compromise security, although it would be technically tough because merely exchanging and being able to read such data would require numerous new technical protocols.

And as an initial step the United States and Russia could resurrect a joint data exchange center in Moscow that was set up under a 1998 agreement to share data from early warning systems tracking ballistic missiles, he said. The venture had withered after its establishment for lack of political support, he said.

But for "political and legitimate security reasons" partners might balk at disclosing more complex data, he said, for example how information about an enemy missile in flight was fed into their own defensive systems.

"And would we share spaced-based information?" he asked. "We have satellites that use infrared detectors to monitor missile launches by looking down and getting initial information from which they can cue radars to point in a certain direction. That data may be a little more difficult to share."

(Editing by Robin Pomeroy)