Now, very briefly, on our European site initiative, as I said earlier, we wanted to extend coverage to our European allies and friends and our considerable number of deployed forces in the region. That means that we needed to have interceptors located in Europe and we needed to have sensors to expand the coverage.
We proposed the Czech Republic for the radar and Poland for the interceptors because, very simply, technically they were the optimum locations. If you look at all of the potential trajectories -- and this particular graph only shows one launch point from Iran to the United States and to Europe, and in reality we looked at all the potential launch points from Iran to all potential target points in the United States and Europe. And Poland and the Czech Republic provided the best azimuth coverage for those trajectories as well as the range back from Iran.
We could be too close. And remember I said we don't have boost phase defenses yet, so we can't engage very close to Iran for the long-range threat, and if you get too far back, you begin to roll back coverage and expose countries that could be vulnerable. So that's why we chose Poland and the Czech Republic. It gave us the azimuth coverage and the range necessary. And again, I'll be able to answer questions on that if you like in the question-and-answer session.
Without the Europe-based system that Bush proposed and the Poles and Czechs accepted, one layer that was supposed to protect America and all of NATO Europe will be gone regardless of how well shorter range systems (currently sea-based so fairly useless inland) could eventually cover eastern Europe.
