MOSCOW — Russia’s military reported a successful test Wednesday of a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile that generals said was designed to overpower the U.S. missile-defense system.
Russian generals told news agencies that the missile’s technological development was a direct response to the U.S. plans for a shield. The rocket, they said, uses a new type of fuel to shorten the time it needs to launch into space, increasing its ability to evade interceptors. One Russian news portal said the rocket was called the “Avantgarde.”
Whatever its military significance, the launch, as with other prominently announced tests, seemed intended as much to deliver a political message as demonstrate the rocket’s ability to streak across Russia and hit a target on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Gen. Viktor Yesin, a retired rocket forces commander, told the Interfax news service that the rocket was emblematic of the type of arms race Russia was ready to embark on if the United States went through with plans to put missile interceptors in Europe.
“This is one of the technical means Russia’s political and military leadership designed to answer America’s global system of missile defense,” Yesin said.
Russian officials have threatened for years that they would bulk up on new intercontinental ballistic missiles, within the limits of arms control treaties, in an effort to overpower the U.S. system, and they have said it could look like a new arms race.
The test Wednesday took on added political significance coming two weeks after Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency for a third term. In another worrying sign for relations between Russia and the United States, Putin canceled a visit to the United States for a summit of the Group of Eight nations last weekend hosted by President Barack Obama at Camp David in Maryland.
Russia’s objection to the missile-defense scheme has reached into the U.S. presidential election. Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican candidate, has criticized Obama as trying to soothe Russia’s concerns as part of the detente known as the reset.
The Obama administration insists that the defensive system would never be directed against Russia, aiming instead at emerging missile threats from Iran or North Korea.
Russian officials say they remain unconvinced by this assurance, and the Russian military has been struggling to modernize its missile arsenal, which had not had majorupgrades since the end of the Cold War.
Putin has called for the production of new missile systems to be doubled in 2013. But development of these weapons designed to be able to overcome defense systems has been slow and has faced costly failures. A submarine-launched missile called the Bulava repeatedly failed in years of tests since 2002, flopping back into the water or blowing up.
Russia’s civilian space rockets, including the Soyuz, which is used to ferry supplies and astronauts to the International Space Station, have also crashed recently. Analysts cite the overall post-Soviet decay in the aerospace supply chain, as hundreds of small factories making specialized parts have closed.
The missile launched Wednesday is not entirely new, the Gazeta.ru news website and other Russian media reported. It is an upgrade of an existing model of a land-based rocket the Russian military has been testing for years, called the Topol, or Poplar.
In 2007, during an earlier period of tension between Russia and the United States over U.S. plans to set up anti-missile sites in eastern Europe, the Russian military also announced the launching of an upgrade to the Topol-M said to be designed to penetrate missile defenses, called the Yars missile.
Front Section, Pages 8 on 05/24/2012