U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos Pascual has said there is no possibility of Ukraine cooperating with Russia in the production of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
This would be impossible because Ukraine has signed the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, the ambassador said in an interview in the Saturday edition of the newspaper Zerkalo Nedeli.
The U.S. realizes that Ukraine and Russia will work together in the military-technical sphere, the ambassador said, referring to the joint manufacture of An-70 aircraft and their involvement in the Sea Launch program.
Ukraine can produce boosters, and the U.S. expects that cooperation with Kyiv on commercial space launches will continue, he said.
Pascual said that new U.S. President George W. Bush, who declared the intention to carry out a program to deploy a national missile defense system (NMD), wants to have detailed consultations with all U.S. allies, Ukraine, Russia, and China, who also are interested in working out missile defense systems.
In any case, new defensive systems could pose no real threat to the elimination of Russia's nuclear weapons, for they are not very significant compared to Russia's nuclear potential and therefore cannot threaten Russia's nuclear deterrence capacity, he said.
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