WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon plans at next week's NATO summit in the Czech Republic to assess the alliance's ability to respond to threats of terrorism, a Defense Department official said Friday, on condition of anonymity.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld first will meet defense ministers in Santiago, Chile Monday and tuesday at the defense ministerial conference of the Americas, and then will accompany U.S. President George W. Bush to Prague on November 21 and 22 for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's annual summit, AFP reported.

NATO enlargement also will be high on the agenda of the Prague summit: The 19-nation alliance is expected to extend deeper than ever into the former Soviet bloc, when it inviting Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovenia and Slovakia to join.

According to the Pentagon official, Rumsfeld will call upon U.S. allies to concentrate their efforts and spending on a few areas.

"These areas include defending against chemical, biological, radiological threats," the source said. The official said the U.S. defense chief will also underscore the need to focus on "secure command, control, communication capabilities and interoperability; Improving combat effectiveness; And improving deployability and particularly sustainability, both inside and outside the European theater." In redefining NATO's command structure in the post-cold war era and in the face of an unprecedented terrorist threat, the alliance should also emphasize "developing expertise in niche areas, such as the control of radioactive weapons."

Rumsfeld will also raise with his NATO counterparts the idea of creating a NATO response force designed to stand alone in a hostile environment for thirty days.

Rumsfeld also hopes to simplify NATO structure and rid the alliance of outdated structures such as the Supreme Allied Commander (SACLANT) and the Allied Command Atlantic (ACLANT), and replace them with a Belgium-based Supreme Commander of European Allied Forces in Europe.

Rumsfeld also will urge the alliance's European members to increase their tanker planes and troop carrying aircraft. On the question of missile defense, Rumsfeld said he expected "NATO leaders to initiate a new missile defense feasibility study to examine options for how missile defense capabilities might be used to defend alliance territory and population centers against a full range of missile threats." On Iraq's decision to accept a United Nations Security Council resolution on disarmament, Rumsfeld said "We're very hopeful that NATO will be very much supportive of UN Security Council Resolution 1441."