DEBKAfile's military sources report Moscow's planned retaliation for America's missile interceptors in Poland and US-Israeli military aid to Georgia may come in the form of installing Iskandar surface missiles in Syria and its Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad.

Russian Baltic and Middle East warships, submarines and long-range bombers may be armed with nuclear warheads, according to Sunday newspapers in Europe.

Syria is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Syria has a standard safeguards agreement with the IAEA but, like Iran, has not yet signed or even begun negotiations on the IAEA Additional Protocol. The Additional Protocol is an important tool that, if fully implemented, could strengthen the IAEA's investigative powers to verify compliance with NPT safeguards obligations and provides the IAEA with the ability to act quickly on any indicators of undeclared nuclear materials, facilities and activities. Syria has called for an area free of all weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East.

Although Syria has long been cited as posing a nuclear proliferation risk, prior to 2007 the country seems to have been too strapped for cash to get far. Syria allegedly began a military nuclear program in 1979 and had not provided the IAEA with full information on all its nuclear activities. Syria had claimed that it was interested in nuclear research for medical rather than military purposes, but Israel and the United States have opposed sales of a reactor to Syria on the grounds that it would serve as an important step toward the building of a nuclear weapon.

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Syria has told fellow Arab countries that it will not permit an International Atomic Energy Agency probe to extend beyond a site bombed by Israel, despite agency interest in three other suspect locations, diplomats told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The agency's main focus during its planned June 22-24 visit to Syria is a building in the country's remote eastern desert that was destroyed by Israeli jets in September.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei announced Monday that Damascus has agreed to an agency check of U.S. assertions that target was a plutonium- producing reactor that was near completion, and thus at the stage where it could generate the fissile material for nuclear arms.

The U.N. agency is also interested in following up on information that Syria may have three other undeclared atomic facilities. Diplomats and a nuclear expert told the AP on Monday that at least one of the sites is believed to be meant to reprocess nuclear material into the fissile core of warheads.