NATO presses Turkey to renounce buying Chinese or Russian air and missile defense systems

PanARMENIAN.Net - NATO officials have warned Turkey that if it buys Chinese or Russian air and missile defense systems, Ankara would operate them without the Western alliance's intelligence on incoming ballistic missiles, according to Defense News.

Turkish officials, who are planning to choose a system late this year or early next year, have declined to rule out the Chinese and Russian entries.

Many Western officials and experts say the Russian and Chinese systems are not compatible with NATO systems. If Ankara picks one, Moscow or Beijing may gain access to classified NATO information and disrupt alliance procedures, they say.

"If, say, the Chinese win the competition, their systems will be in interaction, directly or indirectly, with NATO's intelligence systems, and this may lead to the leak of critical NATO information to the Chinese, albeit inadvertently. So this is dangerous," one Western analyst said.

But one Western official here familiar with NATO matters said alliance officials won't let such information slip.

This was the first time NATO strongly urged Turkey against choosing the non-Western systems.

Turkey's national air and missile competition has attracted bids from a U.S. partnership of Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, offering the Patriot air defense system; Russia's Rosoboronexport, marketing the S-300; China's CPMIEC (China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corp.), offering its HQ-9; and the Italian-French consortium Eurosam, maker of the SAMP/T Aster 30.

Turkey joined the alliance in 1952. Havelsan of Turkey and Boeing of the United States are in the process of developing a next generation, high altitude ballistic missile defense shield. It is envisaged that the system will be used by the U.S., Turkey and other NATO member states.