Russia successfully test-fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile Tuesday featuring multiple warheads designed to overcome missile defense systems, the Defense Ministry said.

A ministry spokesman said the RS-24 missile was fired from a mobile launcher at 10:20 GMT from the Plesetsk cosmodrome about 800 km north of Moscow.

Less than an hour later, Russia's Strategic Missile Forces command said the missile had hit its targets at the Kura test site on the sparsely inhabited far eastern peninsula of Kamchatka to the north of Japan.

"The RS-24 intercontinental ballistic missile will strengthen the military potential of Russia's strategic rocket forces to overcome anti-missile defense systems and thereby strengthen the potential nuclear deterrent of Russia's strategic nuclear forces," the Strategic Missile Forces command said in a statement.

Russian military experts said the new missile launch formed part of a "highly effective response" promised by President Vladimir Putin to a missile defense shield which Washington aims to build in Europe to detect and shoot down hostile missiles.

"It can overcome any potential entire missile defense systems developed by foreign countries," Colonel-General Viktor Yesin told the official Russian Today television channel.

The plans have alarmed Moscow and strained relations with the United States. Russia says the missile defense shield is a threat to its security but Washington dismisses such fears, saying the shield is intended to counter "rogue states".

Putin stepped up his attacks on the shield Tuesday, saying its deployment in Europe would turn the continent into "a powder keg".

"We consider it harmful and dangerous to turn Europe into a powder keg and to stuff it with new weapons," Putin told visiting Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates at the Kremlin.

"It creates new and unnecessary risks for the whole system of international and European relations," he told Socrates, whose country takes over the rotating EU presidency on July 1.

First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov said the deployment of medium and short range missiles by Russia's neighbors to the east and south now posed a "real threat".

Ivanov, a former defense minister, is widely seen as a front-runner to succeed President Vladimir Putin in an election next March.

The new RS-24 missile can be armed with up to 10 different warheads and is intended to replace Russia's earlier generation intercontinental missiles such as the RS-18 and RS-20.

Its development is part of a drive to re-equip Russia's military with updated weaponry and replace hardware dating from the Cold War.

Missiles carrying multiple independently targeted warheads are more difficult to intercept and destroy completely once they have been fired, making defenses against them much harder.

(China Daily via agencies May 30, 2007)