Poland

NATO is looking into how a planned US missile shield in Poland and the Czech Republic could relate to the alliance, on both technical and political levels, its secretary general said Friday.

Signaling a tougher position in negotiations with the United States on a European anti-ballistic missile shield, Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski says the new Warsaw government is not prepared to accept U.S. plans to deploy part of the shield in Poland until all costs and risks are considered. "This is an American, not a Polish project," Sikorski said in an interview published in the weekend edition of the daily Gazeta Wyborcza.

Soviet era foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze on Wednesday warned world leaders not to let the row over US plans to place a missile shield in Europe escalate into another Cold War. "We must not repeat the mistakes of the past, we must not allow another Cold War to happen," Shevardnadze said as he presented the German version of his political memoirs, "Thoughts on the Past and the Future", at the Frankfurt Book Fair. "It is my moral duty to make this warning. We must not allow the upset about missiles and anti-missile systems to escalate.

MOSCOW, October 11 (RIA Novosti) - The missile defense elements the U.S. plans to deploy in Poland could be used as shock weapons, and present a real threat to Russia, a Russian military expert said on Thursday. "The antimissile missiles the U.S. plans to deploy in Poland are capable of flying along a ballistic trajectory, and can be considered a shock weapon. They can easily be equipped with special warheads and are fairly precise," Professor Vladimir Zavaly, a missile defense expert, told RIA Novosti.