WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 — President Bush on Tuesday strongly defended plans to build missile defenses in Europe, arguing that Iran posed an urgent threat to some NATO allies. He also chided the Democratic-controlled Congress for cutting spending that he called “vital to the security of America.”
“The need for missile defense in Europe is real, and I believe it is urgent,” Mr. Bush said, speaking at the National Defense University here. “Iran is pursuing the technology that could be used to produce nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles of increasing range that could deliver them.”
Mr. Bush’s remarks — part of a broad defense of the administration’s national security strategy after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — came only 11 days after his secretaries of state and defense went to Moscow and discussed ways to ease Russia’s concerns over the deployment of missile defenses in Poland and the Czech Republic.
While Mr. Bush invited Russian cooperation, he also made it clear that the administration intended to proceed with building missile sites as part of a plan to deploy the interceptor missiles in several years. His tone appeared more hawkish than that of Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, who had said earlier in the day in Prague that while the United States wanted the deployment to move forward, the missiles might not be activated immediately after being deployed.
“We have not fully developed this proposal,” Mr. Gates said, appearing with the Czech prime minister, Mirek Topolanek, “but the idea was we would go forward with the negotiations, we would complete the negotiations, we would develop the sites, build the sites, but perhaps delay activating them until there was concrete proof of the threat from Iran.”
At the meetings in Moscow, on Oct. 12 and 13, the Russians called for the United States to freeze the planned deployment of the missiles in Poland and a radar station in the Czech Republic. While Mr. Gates and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice ruled that out, the two countries did agree to share information about potential threats from Iran.
Mr. Bush would like to make missile defense a defining legacy of his presidency, though critics say the initial system, with a limited number of missile interceptors in Alaska and California, remains unproven. Missile defense has been a core of Republican ideology since Ronald Reagan proposed what came to be known as the “Star Wars” program in 1983, and it remains hugely popular among the Republican candidates vying to succeed Mr. Bush.
“We should move as quickly as we can to build missile defense,” Rudolph W. Giuliani said during the Republican candidates’ debate on Sunday night in Orlando, Fla. Senator John McCain said that the objections of President Vladimir V. Putin were not an obstacle to deploying a system, but rather a justification of it.
“This is a dangerous person, and he has to understand that there’s a cost to some of his actions,” Mr. McCain said. “And the first thing I would do is make sure that we have a missile defense system in place” in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The Democratic presidential candidates, by contrast, have rarely discussed it and, when they do, usually criticize it for soaking up resources that might be better spent on more pressing threats or domestic needs.
Mr. Bush suggested that missile defenses would be a deterrent the same way that an overwhelming capacity for nuclear retaliation once was with the Soviet Union.
“A terrorist regime that can strike America or our allies with a ballistic missile is likely to see this power as giving them free rein for acts of aggression and intimidation in their own neighborhoods,” he said. “But with missile defenses in place, the calculus of deterrence changes in our favor. If this same terrorist regime does not have confidence their missile attack would be successful, it is less likely to engage in acts of aggression in the first place.”
In speaking at the National Defense University, Mr. Bush was returning to the place where he first pledged to build a national missile defense more than six and a half years ago. But critics questioned the urgency of the threat, and even Mr. Bush said that intelligence agencies did not believe that Iran could build a ballistic missile capable of striking the United States before 2015 — and then only with foreign assistance.
“There are a lot of ifs, ands and buts,” Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said of Iran’s missile abilities.
The administration hopes to reach agreements by year’s end with Poland and the Czech Republic and to break ground on the missile sites before Mr. Bush leaves office.
Mr. Bush raised the issue again now, aides said, to fend off Congressional efforts to cut spending, which he said would delay the deployments in Europe “for a year or more.” Mr. Bush, who the day before asked Congress to approve $196 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and other programs, complained that Congress was proposing cutting $290 million from the $8.9 billion he proposed for missile defense in the current fiscal year.
Representative Ellen O. Tauscher of California, a Democrat, dismissed Mr. Bush’s criticism. She said there was bipartisan support for defenses focused on more immediate threats of shorter-range missiles that could strike American allies or forces in the Middle East and Europe.
“There’s no need for us to rush ahead to deal with an emerging threat,” she said, referring to Iran’s possible development of intercontinental missiles, “when we have such gaps now for the current threat.”
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