>Об этом в интервью газете "Вашингтон таймс" заявил заместитель госсекретаря США Джон Болтон.
Тут опять произошла некоторая путаница. Действительно, Вашингтон Таймс сегодня опубликовала статью об этом, но Болтон не давал интервью газете. Судя по всему - речь идет об интервью Болтона журналу Армз Контрол Тудей, которое было опубликовано вчера:
Кстати, интереснейший материал - советую посмотреть. Один из интересных моментов, Болтон подтверждает, что на самом деле администрация Буша (в отличие от команды Клинтона) даже не пыталась предлагать России какие-либо поправки к Договору ПРО, как утверждали некоторые комментаторы:
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ACT: In an interview with Arms Control Today, published in September 2000, then-candidate George W. Bush declared that he would "offer Russia the necessary amendments to the ABM Treaty so as to make our deployment of effective missile defenses consistent with the treaty." But Russian officials, including President Putin, claim the United States never offered amendments to the treaty before President Bush announced the U.S. intention to withdraw on December 13. Did the U.S. propose specific amendments to the ABM Treaty?
Bolton: We proposed a variety of different ways to deal with the threat of ballistic missiles held by rogue states, and the possibility of accidental launch to see if there wasn't some way that we could reach agreement with the Russians that would be mutually acceptable to move beyond the ABM Treaty as written. And we had extensive discussions with them. I think in the period after the first meeting between the two presidents at Ljubljana that Secretary Powell and Foreign Minister Ivanov met something like 16 or 17 times, and God only knows how many telephone calls they had. We had many, many other meetings at many other levels. I went to Moscow seven times in the fall of 2001 to meet with a variety of Russian officials, and my counterparts at the Department of Defense did the same. The Russians came here. We had a very intense diplomatic effort to see if there wasn't some mutually satisfactory way to get out of the constraints of the ABM Treaty and allow us to build a limited national missile defense, which is what candidate Bush had committed to. Ultimately, that didn't work out satisfactorily, but we were as creative as we could be in trying to offer the Russians a whole different series of measures that we hoped we could have reached agreement on. As I say, unfortunately, we were not able to do it, and we had to announce our withdrawal from the ABM Treaty, which now allows us, frankly, to go on and focus on other issues like codifying our agreements on reduced offensive weapons.
ACT: So you are saying that the United States never proposed actual amendments to the ABM Treaty?
Bolton: What we said was we're not going to get into a line-in, line-out amendment of the ABM Treaty, because, in fact that would have been impossible. The treaty is very well-written. It was intended to prevent the creation of a national missile defense system, and that's exactly what it did and that's exactly what we wanted to do. But we discussed a whole range of other possible approaches to the problem with the Russians, that, for their own reasons—no doubt good and sufficient to them—they declined to follow.
ACT: Excuse me, sir. I don't mean to press this, but I just want to make sure I'm perfectly clear. So the answer is that we did not offer Russia specific amendments to the ABM Treaty, is that right?
Bolton: We didn't do line-in, line-out amendments. We talked about ways possibly with a new treaty that would replace it, or other ways that would give us what we wanted in terms of freedom from the constraints of the ABM Treaty as written. And I think the Russians understood exactly what we were talking about. They have a very sophisticated knowledge of the subject and the treaty, and it was not something they were prepared to agree to—despite, I think, good-faith efforts on their part and on ours—to see if there wasn't a mutually acceptable way to get beyond the '72 treaty.
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