WARSAW, April 23 (Xinhua)-- Fifty seven percent of the respondents of a Polish Center of Public Opinion (CBOS) poll said they were against the deployment of an missile defense shield in Poland, up by 25 percent from 2005, the Polish PAP news agency reported on Monday.

    Twenty five percent supported the plan and 18 percent did not have any opinion.

    Forty one percent said the anti-missile shield project should be implemented by NATO and not only by the U.S., five percent said such a proposal was worse, 29 percent did not see any difference and 25 percent were undecided.

    CBOS ran the poll on a sample of 937 adult Poles from March 30 to April 2.

    The U.S. government in January made a formal offer to the Czech Republic and Poland to open talks on the shield. Under the proposal, Poland could be the base for underground rocket silos and the Czech Republic would host the radar system.

    At an earlier meeting between Polish Defense Minister Aleksander Szczyglo and Russian Ambassador to Poland Vladimir Grinin, Grinin tried to persuade the Polish minister that Russia believed the deployment may violate the balance of forces till date.

    He stressed that Russia is interested in a joint evaluation of possible threats to the EU, NATO and the Russian Federation as well as in working out a common system to counteract them.