Bush gives Russians until November to agree on missile shield

The United States has tightened the screw on Russia by issuing what amounts to a November deadline for Moscow to agree to President Bush's plan for a missile defence shield – failing which the administration would unilaterally pull out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

Yesterday senior US officials were insisting that remarks to a Russian radio station by John Bolton, the Secretary of State's senior adviser on arms control, after talks in Moscow were not an ultimatum. In the interview, Mr Bolton declared that both sides should aim for "meaningful progress" by the time President Vladimir Putin visits Mr Bush at his Texas ranch in November.

Washington did not want to violate the treaty, Mr Bolton said. "But if we do not manage to come to an agreement with Russia, then we will use our right outlined in the treaty not to violate it, but to withdraw from it."

Even if they do not constitute a formal deadline, his words underline how the moment of truth for missile defence and the ABM treaty is fast approaching, with the scheduled start of building work on an anti-missile test site in Alaska and further mid-ocean interception tests by the Pentagon due in a few months time.

The ABM treaty, signed by Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the height of the Cold War, has long been regarded as a cornerstone of arms control, underpinning the doctrine of "MAD", or mutual assured destruction, which for four decades kept an uneasy peace between the two superpowers.

But the Bush administration says times have changed, and today's real danger is not a massive nuclear exchange between Russia and the US, but a sneak missile attack by a country such as North Korea or Iran, which could be dealt with by a missile defence shield. Hence Washington's determination to press ahead – and its growing belief that Moscow is playing for time over a treaty revision it opposes.

The ABM pact requires either party to give six months notice before withdrawing. Were the US to do this immediately after a failed Putin/Bush summit, it would be able to start construction work in earnest in Alaska in the late spring of 2002. At that point the pressure on Britain to come off the fence would become intense.

An upgrading of US tracking sites in Britain is a crucial part of the missile defence project, but so far Tony Blair has refused to commit himself. A full-scale US go-ahead would force him to make up his mind.

In fact, the biggest obstacle to Mr Bush's ambitions may lie not in Moscow but just a mile away on Capitol Hill, in a senate now controlled by the Democrats. They have long been more sceptical of missile defence than the Republicans.

Carl Levin of Michigan, the new chairman of the armed services committee, has hinted he will block any portion of the $8.3bn (£5.7bn) allocated to missile defence in the Pentagon's 2002 budget, should that expenditure put the US in breach of the treaty. That could upset plans to install the test silos at Fort Greely, near Fairbanks, Alaska,