For Obama And Medvedev, Some Cold War-Style Frost Over Missile Defense

[Purveyor]

By Christi Parsons, May 27, 2011, 5:10 a.m.

Reporting from Deauville, France—
President Obama and Russian President Dmitri Medvedev have a friendship reputed to be so warm that they can go out for hamburgers together, and joke about mutual acquaintances (even if they refuse to say who they are).

The two 40-something lawyers like to point out that they came of age in the Cold War, and then moved beyond it.

But on Thursday, they were reminded of the difficulty of those old battles.

The subject in their one-on-one meeting here at the Group of 8 industrial nations summit was the missile defense system U.S. officials want to build in Europe — and the unabated Russian concern about it.

Russia furiously opposed a missile system proposed by former President George W. Bush, involving large, land-based sites in eastern Europe. Obama scaled back that program, and reached a deal with NATO allies last year to jointly develop a new system, with Russian participation.

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http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-pn-obama-medvedev-missile-defense-20110527,0,1810875.story