WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. and Russian defense teams completed on Wednesday two days of detailed and ``very positive'' talks on U.S. missile defense plans and bilateral security cooperation, a senior Pentagon official said.
The official, who asked not to be identified, spoke with Reuters about the meetings ahead of a visit to Moscow by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for talks next week with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Ivanov.
``The atmosphere has been very good and very positive,'' the official said, adding the United States had provided briefings on the Bush administration's controversial anti-missile plans to a visiting 10-member team headed by Gen. Yuri Baluyevsky, first deputy chief of the Russian military staff.
``They (the Russians) are clearly committed to making this work,'' the Pentagon official said, commenting on an agreement by President Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin to press forward toward a new security framework between Moscow and Washington.
Russia has bitterly opposed plans by the United States to develop a limited missile defense against potential attack from ''rogue states'' such as North Korea, Iran and Iraq.
DOOR OPEN TO CHANGE?
But Moscow opened the door to a possible shift in that stand when Bush and Putin agreed last month in Genoa, Italy, to link U.S. missile defense with large cuts that the Kremlin wants in both nations' massive nuclear arsenals.
The U.S. team, headed by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, held more than 16 hours of talks with the Russian delegation to answer Moscow's questions about the anti-missile initiative and discuss offensive and defensive weapons and increased military-to-military ties.
Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, head of the Pentagon's ballistic missile defense effort, briefed Baluyevsky's team on Tuesday, the Pentagon official told Reuters.
That briefing included progress on tests of a ``hit-to-kill'' projectile under development to be fired from the ground and collide with approaching missile warheads in space as well as an airborne laser weapon being built by the Air Force to burn up ballistic missiles as they are fired from their launch pad.
The United States is planning to spend 8.2 billion on missile defense development and testing in the fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1, Kadish said in his briefing. Last month, a missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California was struck 140 miles above the central Pacific by an interceptor fire from Kwajalein Atoll, 4,800 miles away. It was the second successful test of Bush's missile defense system out of four that have been conducted.
RUSSIANS WATCH FILMS
The Russians were shown brief film clips of a Patriot PAC-3 missile hitting another missile in successful test action. The PAC-3 is an advanced version of U.S. missiles used against Iraqi Scud battlefield-range missiles in the 1991 Gulf War.
Russia has charged that building an anti-missile system, prohibited by the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union, could shatter cooperation on other agreements such as nuclear arms cuts.
Moscow sees the ABM treaty as the keystone of strategic stability and says its abrogation by Washington could shatter 30 other arms control accords built around the pact. To date, Russia has refused, at least publicly, to contemplate rewriting or abandoning the accord.
But Putin's agreement to link talks on missile defense to cuts in nuclear stockpiles has fueled speculation Russia is now ready to accept a U.S. missile shield in return for a mutual cut of nuclear arsenals to 1,500 warheads.
Under the planned START-2 strategic arms reduction treaty, the two sides would go down to about 3,500 warheads each. But Moscow cannot afford to maintain such an arsenal and the Pentagon is currently assessing whether it is prepared to go lower.