Azernews.Az

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Defense Department is close to reaching an agreement with a country in southern Europe on the deployment of a missile early-warning radar to counter potential missile strikes from Iran, The Washington Post reported.

"The U.S. military is on the verge of activating a partial missile shield over southern Europe, part of an intensifying global effort to build defenses against Iranian missiles amid a deepening impasse over the country's nuclear ambitions," the newspaper said in an article published on Sunday.

Citing unidentified Pentagon sources, the paper said a powerful X-band missile-tracking radar would be probably deployed either in Turkey or Bulgaria as early as next year, and it would enable the first phase of the missile shield.

The new radar will feed early-warning data to U.S. warships equipped with Aegis missile system, which are deployed in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf.

Although the Barack Obama administration scrapped last September earlier plans to deploy missile defense elements in the Czech Republic and Poland in response to strong opposition from Russia, Washington has not given up on its European missile shield initiative.

In May, the United States opened a Patriot missile base in northern Poland, just 80 km