Missile Plan Criticized

Schröder warned that the United States plan to install a radar base in the Czech Republic and interceptor missiles in Poland established a "policy of encirclement against Russia." The decision could lead to a new arms race, Schröder said in a speech Sunday.

The United States has said it wants to establish a European system to protect against attacks by countries such as North Korea and Iran. Russia has seen the plan as a threat to its security. Senior Russian military figures have threatened to target the missile-shield sites with their own weapons.

Provoking an arms race

The US missile defense system could lead to a new global arms race, Schröder warned at a Sunday event in Dresden. He said current Chancellor Angela Merkel's government should try to persuade Washington to drop its plan.

Merkel's government has backed the US plan, saying it was a "purely defensive system" not aimed at Russia.

Schröder has close personal ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and is currently involved with a Russian-German natural gas consortium.

The US was pursuing a containment strategy against Russia, Schröder warned. Europe should avoid similar actions which could be seen as encircling Russia. These included plans for Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO, Schröder said.

The former chancellor admitted Russia has a bad human rights record, but said the country was at the beginning of a new era. He encouraged Europe to strengthen its energy partnership with Russia, which currently supplies 30 percent of the EU's crude oil and 30 percent of Germany's natural gas.

Other German political leaders also issued strong criticism of the US plan.

Putting missiles in eastern Europe is not a private matter between Prague, Warsaw and Washington, opposition Free Democratic Party leader Guido Westerwelle wrote in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper on Sunday. It's an important issue for all of Europe.

German Left Party leader Gregor Gysi was also critical.

"This would be the start of a new arms race and a new Cold War that is wasteful and unnecessary," he said in an interview published Sunday in the magazine Super Illu.

NATO chief criticizes plan

NATO's secretary general criticized the US plan as not adequately covering some south-eastern states in Europe, which would need an extra, short-range system to defend against Iran.

"When it comes to missile defense, there shouldn't be an A-league and a B-league within NATO," Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told the Financial Times in an article published Monday. "For me it is indivisibility of security that is the guiding principle."

Europe has plans for its own battlefield defense system which should be ready by 2010 to protect deployed forces, de Hoop Scheffer told the newspaper.

"There could be at a later stage a relationship between the two systems," he said.