Rumsfeld to NATO: "It could happen to you"
( 2001-12-19 11:10 ) (7 )

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned on Tuesday that London, Paris, Berlin and other European cities could become targets for deadly attacks like the September 11 assaults on New York and Washington.

He told NATO defence ministers that the crashes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center were the kind of unpredictable events that might be unleashed in "tumultuous decades ahead".

Defending a US plan to develop a national missile defence despite Russian opposition and European concern, Rumsfeld urged the allies to develop defences against "asymmetric threats" ranging from biological arms to cyber-crime.

And he suggested that European soldiers should be prepared to go anywhere with American troops to help hunt down terrorists despite years of Cold War reluctance to go "out of area".

"The terrorists and their state sponsors have demonstrated both their ingenuity and their ruthless disregard for human life," the secretary said in remarks to the opening session of a two-day winter security meeting.

"As we look at the devastation they unleashed in the United States, contemplate the destruction they could wreak in New York, or London, or Paris, of Berlin with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons."

The sombre message was delivered at Rumsfeld's first NATO meeting since the attacks on the United States, which Washington says were engineered by Saudi-born militant Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, now hunted by US forces in Afghanistan.