By Peter Walker
Russia and the US could be edging towards a modern, limited version of the cold war - but this time it is being driven purely by politics, with military considerations a near irrelevance, according to analysts. As today's Guardian reports, Kremlin officials say Russia is considering a military response to the planned US missile defence system, which will see sites based in eastern Europe - territory Russia still considers its backyard.
This is likely to involve Moscow improving its own missile technology, making the weapons more advanced, more mobile and thus less vulnerable to the US shield.
However, any talk of a new arms race ignores one key fact, analysts say - the missile defence system poses no real threat to Russia's missile arsenal.
The US plans call for only 10 interceptor missiles in Poland and a radar site in the Czech Republic, Colonel Christopher Langton, a former UK defence attaché in Russia and now an analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies thinktank, said.
"The technical experts would tell you that neither of these components constitutes a threat to Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent," he said, noting that up to four interceptor devices would be needed to eliminate just one Russian intercontinental missile.
"There's also a very potent argument that it isn't a threat because it's that close to Russia, and is actually very vulnerable, not just to missiles but aircraft and even tactical weapons.
"If the US wanted to make it invulnerable, it would move it to Scotland or somewhere like that."
The missile defence system does, however, represent "a stick with which Russia can beat the United States", Colonel Langton said, and this was being used by the country's generals to make a bellicose point.
"Some people in the upper echelons of the Ministry of Defence, who have come out of the cold war and the collapse of the Soviet Union, felt very keenly that their pride had been damaged," he said.
"Now they have an opportunity - possibly the last opportunity - to say: 'We told you, we were right, Nato was never going to be a friend.'"
Yury Fedorov, an expert on Russian foreign and security policy at Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) thinktank, agreed that describing the US missile defence system as a military threat to Russia was "simply senseless".
"So the question is, why are Russia's political and military elites using this issue to initiate if not a new round of the cold war then something like it?" he said.
"The answer is simple - Russia's military needs to have some pretext to increase its funding under the budget. Russia's defence industry also wants to build new missiles. It's a normal way of thinking for the military and defence industry."
Politics was very much driving the Russians, added Tim Williams, head of the European security programme at the Royal United Services Institute.
"The Russians know full well - and the Americans have underlined to them - that this system is useless against them; it's in the wrong place, it doesn't have enough interceptors," he said. "If the Russians wanted to overwhelm it, they could do so very easily."
"What Russia is really concerned about, as well as lingering concerns about US missile defence, which they have always opposed, is their loss of influence. They work very much in terms of spheres of influence and this is another erosion of this."
Britain also officially stresses that Russia has nothing to worry about militarily from the US system, which it supports.
The US had made it clear to Moscow that its plans "are not aimed at countering the Russian strategic nuclear forces", a ministry of defence spokeswoman said, but are "designed to tackle limited threats from states of concern which seek to acquire and threaten to use ballistic missiles".
