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Successive administrations have urged the creation of an anti-missile system to protect against long-range ballistic missile threats from rogue states. The Bush Administration believes that North Korea and Iran are strategic threats and questions whether they can be deterred by conventional means. The Administration's policy position on this issue remains unchanged after a recent reassessment that the Iranian nuclear weapons program halted in 2003. The Administration has built long-range missile defense bases in Alaska and California to protect against North Korean missile threats. Although the system has been tested, most agree that further testing is necessary. The Administration proposed deploying a ground-based mid-course defense (GMD) element of the larger Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS) in Europe to defend against an Iranian missile threat. The system would include 10 interceptors in Poland and a radar in the Czech Republic to be completed by 2013 at a cost of $4.04 billion. The proposed U.S. system has encountered resistance in some European countries and beyond. Critics in Poland and the Czech Republic assert that neither country currently faces a notable threat from Iran, but that if American GMD facilities were installed, both countries might be targeted by missiles from rogue states -- and possibly from Russia. Some Europeans claim that GMD is another manifestation of American unilateralism, and assert that the Bush Administration did not consult sufficiently with NATO allies or with Russia, which the Administration argues was not the case. Other European leaders, however, support the missile defense project. NATO has also been deliberating long-range missile defense, and has taken actions that have been interpreted as an endorsement of the American GMD system--" Taken from http://fpc.state.gov/documents/organization/115900.pdf