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reports last week in China's state-controlled media and online military websites suggested that the first of a new class of a stealthy littoral combat frigate, the type 056, had been launched at Shanghai's Hudong shipyard with three others under construction.Naval analysts said the new 1,700-tonne ship, armed with a 76mm main gun, missiles and anti-submarine torpedoes, would be ideal for patrolling the South China Sea.These new warships would easily outgun the warships of rival claimants, they said.

"Make no mistake, in a steady, deliberate and sustainable way, the United States military is rebalancing and bringing an enhanced capability development to this vital region," Panetta told the Shangri-La Dialogue, an annual security conference in Singapore attended by civilian and military leaders from Asia-Pacific and Western nations.

As part of the strategic pivot unveiled in January, the United States will deploy 60 per cent of its warships in the Asia-Pacific, up from 50 per cent now. They will include six aircraft carriers and a majority of the U.S. navy's cruisers, destroyers, littoral combat ships and submarines.

As part of his swing through Asia last week, Panetta also visited India and Vietnam in a bid to enhance security ties with two key regional powers that have not been traditional U.S. allies but are increasingly apprehensive about China's rise.At Vietnam's deep water port of Cam Ranh Bay, a key U.S. base during the Vietnam War, Panetta said the use of this harbour would be important to the Pentagon as it moved more ships to Asia.

the NPT review conference, which is going to be one of these agonizing, multilateral events

we don't say anything about U.S. forward-deployed systems in Europe, and we don't do that because we don't want to act unilaterally. This is an alliance issue and should be dealt with and we should achieve consensus within the alliance.

We have opportunities in NATO over the next year, in looking at the alliance's strategic concept, to talk about U.S. forward-deployed nuclear weapons, and we'll do that. It will begin very soon and continue throughout the year, looking at the Lisbon summit meeting in November.

Whether we'll have a multilateral negotiation, the NPR doesn't deal with that. We haven't addressed it as a government. I'll express my personal view on that: I don't think we're going to have a multilateral negotiation. (Chuckles.) When we were talking about INF systems in Europe, that wasn't a multilateral negotiation. I don't see it here. And it's not even clear whether the problem of Russian non-strategic weapons is amenable to arms-control kinds of solutions.

Connoisseurs of NPRs will not find the word reliance in this NPR. The last NPR said it was an objective of policy to reduce reliance on nuclear weapons, and the services took the message, as did lots of other actors. We've said we're trying to reduce the roles and numbers. But where roles remain, deterrence has to be not only maintained but strengthened in the manner of broadening and diversifying

the Russians right now are in their modernization phase. They're well into it and working their way through what their next 30 years of delivery vehicles and weapons is going to look like. We haven't really entered it. We're just now starting to get into that side of the equation.

how do you keep the balance -- not from a weapons standpoint, but from a stability standpoint -- with China, Russia and the United States, with China getting at the cutting edge of technology and moving as quickly as they can? Maybe they don't have the number of warheads today, but you still have to pay attention. And how do you take then the Russian side of this equation, which is a drastic demographic reduction, yet looking at kind of the reverse of the Fulda Gap? They're worried about divisions to their south, divisions to their west. Weapons have a very different meaning to them today than they did in the Cold War.

The Chinese are trying to understand what their threat is and how they're going to handle deterrence, and we're trying to straddle and make sure that we don't unseat this balance.

That's why, for me, it's been so important to think beyond nuclear when you're thinking deterrence. Because I just don't think nuclear is enough, in the broad spectrum of threat that we'll face.

the president has come out and said as long as we have a need for our nuclear stockpiles, as long as other nations have them, he is committed to maintaining them. He is committed to revitalizing the infrastructure, the experimental capabilities, the buildings where these people work. Much of the infrastructure I've got, particularly the uranium/plutonium infrastructure, literally dates back to the early 1950s. They were designed in the '40s, built and started operating in 1952. So it's going to take us 10 years to get this up. So it takes a sustained effort, and that's what it's going to take.

Obviously, our forward-deployed systems in Europe are -- it's a political-military issue. And I understand that the NPR did not want to prejudice the discussions underway at NATO. But if I can just separate the military for a moment, is there a military mission performed by these aircraft-delivered weapons that cannot be performed by either U.S. strategic forces or U.S. conventional forces? CARTWRIGHT: No. (Scattered laughter.)

It doesn't anywhere say we're committed to reducing reliance on. We're committed to reducing the roles and reducing the salience of, internationally

On the NATO topic, I wish it were as simple. I would put a question back: what targets do NATO's weapons have? Not nuclear. Any weapon in NATO. An alliance that doesn't have an enemy -- (scattered laughter) -- so the argument about where nuclear weapons might be pointed is only a part of the argument.

The theme we carry in the NPR and that we're going to carry forward to Tolline (ph) and beyond is that nuclear sharing is what has been essential to NATO, in terms of the credibility of deterrence and assurance. And the choices NATO makes are interpreted by its members as being reflective of how committed those members are to their Article V obligations. And there are plenty of NATO's members who are worried that NATO would make a choice to abandon nuclear weapons and thus put at risk their ability to do Article V actions. And so when we've said in our policy goal we are interested in strengthening regional deterrence and reassurance of allies, these are two sides of the same coin

Where we try and lead NATO -- the president said about NATO, he was there a year ago, to listen and learn and we'll come back to lead. As we come back to lead on this NATO nuclear topic, we're going to bring the messages of burden and risk sharing, because these are essential to the -- uniquely to this alliance. The NPR talks about extended deterrence in Europe, East Asia and the Middle East. Uniquely to the European landscape is this risk and burden-sharing dimension. And it's a different way of think about the capabilities question.

as General Cartwright observed, the technical possibilities of breakthrough and breakout capabilities are there, but the ones that Russia and China most worry about are our possible breakout capabilities. And if we're serious about meeting their requirements for strategic stability, we need to do a better job than we have of putting all of this together in a comprehensive role and getting off of defensive mode and saying, oh, don't worry, missile defenses aren't pointed at you, and strategic stability is untroubled by our capabilities, and get on to a more solid foundation.

we've tried to engage Russia on missile defense. We have proposals for extensive cooperation in the area of missile defense. The Russians haven't been interested, so far, in engaging on that. And not to mention the difficulties of engaging with them on non-strategic forces.

We need to reassure our allies for -- because we're committed to do that, but also because for a nonproliferation reason, we don't want them to develop a -- to feel they have incentives to acquire their own deterrent capabilities.

I think this is a balanced report; this is not a revolutionary report. Some were hoping for more on declaratory policy. Some were hoping that we'd go for a no-first-use approach, say that the sole purpose of U.S. nuclear weapons is to deter a nuclear attack. We weren't prepared to go there.

We believe there remains a narrow range of contingencies in which nuclear weapons continue to play a role in deterring non-nuclear attack. We're prepared to state that as an objective, but not to say we're ready yet.

I think going farther faster would have been unsettling to some of our friends around the world. I think it would be unsettling to domestic audiences as well. And we -- to be frank, the administration had its sights set on gaining two-thirds of the U.S. Senate for ratification of START and the CTBT. And I think this document will move us toward the goals enunciated by the president without kind of upsetting the apple cart and making this difficult to have further progress.

it does seem to me that in this document, the U.S. is saying we withhold the right to use nuclear weapons against an Iran that has no nuclear weapons. And in making this particular threat, we're basically just extending the continuity from the Bush administration that keeps all military options on the table and, whether explicitly or implicitly, also had threatened Iran to use nuclear weapons against Iran that did not have nuclear weapons. So I guess the way I would end this question is, is this the right message for the Green movement in Iran, for the Brazils and the Turkeys of the world that this U.S., which says it's reducing the role of nuclear weapons, reserves the right to use this weapon of mass destruction against an Iran that does not yet have nuclear weapons? EINHORN: This negative security assurance was about assuring non-nuclear weapon states, party to the NPT in good standing with the NPT. It was not about threatening -- (chuckles) -- those that are not in good standing. I know -- the Iranians will try to capitalize, there'll be a lot of Iranian propaganda that this whole thing is about an implicit threat to Iran. It's not about an implicit threat to Iran.

we made clear in the NPR that countries that are not -- we're not increasing the likelihood of using nuclear weapons against countries that are not eligible to receive this pledge. The countries that are not covered by the pledge are simply not affected by it. It's not as if we've increased the threat to France or Russia or the U.K. or something like that. And neither have we increased the threat to North Korea or Iran. The situation is simply unaffected.

Or we're as serious about NPT membership as we are compliance, because the pledge is also not offered to Israel, India and Pakistan. But it seems like those three countries are in much better shape than Iran, even though Iran is partially in compliance with its IAEA safeguards agreement.