NATO reviewing technical aspects of US missile shield: chief

Vilnius: 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.

"We are working at a technical level to answer a number of technical questions but we are of course also discussing this at the political level in answering the question (of) how NATO responsibility on missile defence relates to the so-called US sites," NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said.

He was speaking at the close of an informal meeting of 26 NATO defence ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania. Alliance members will meet again at a formal summit of heads of state and government in Bucharest in early April.

Scheffer said bilateral negotiations continued between the US, the Czech Republic and Poland and "we are preparing what I hope would be a decision in Bucharest -- not a final decision of course".

"Many things will have to be worked out -- what the NATO responsibility on missile defence will be, how it will look like taking into account the US system," he added.

Czech and US negotiators said Thursday they had reached agreement on how a planned US anti-missile radar sited in the Czech Republic could form part of a broader NATO missile defence system.

"To all intents, we reached agreement on language in the agreement that discusses how a radar in the Czech Republic would contribute to the greater defence of the NATO alliance," US Assistant Secretary of State John Rood said.

Both negotiators refused to give details of their agreement which could pave the way for the radar's place in a broader NATO missile defence system.

NATO has repeatedly stressed that the US decision to expand its missile defence shield into central Europe is a bilateral issue between Washington on one hand and Prague and Warsaw on the other.

But diplomats in Brussels' NATO headquarters say both Warsaw and Prague want NATO's blessing in order to encourage public support for the project.

The proposed Czech radar would be twinned with 10 interceptor missiles in neighbouring Poland which Washington says could counter the threat of an attack from "rogue" states such as Iran.

Negotiations on the shield began in early 2007 amid strong protests by Moscow that the project poses a grave threat to Russian national security interests -- a charge the US has flatly denied.