The Bush administration shows little interest in producing a replacement for a major nuclear arms reduction treaty that is set to expire at the end of next year, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said yesterday (see GSN, April 2).
The 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty allows Russia and the United States to each deploy no more than 6,000 nuclear warheads and a maximum of 1,600 delivery vehicles. Moscow has been eager to see some sort of similar agreement in place after the treaty expires.
"Negotiations between us and Washington to make sure that after START I treaty expires in December 2009 we have some meaningful strategic arms control regime, these negotiations are not so far heading anywhere," Lavrov said at the United Nations, Reuters reported.
"Our American colleagues do not want to keep limits on the delivery vehicles (missile) and on nuclear warheads in storage," he said. "They only want to keep some limits on the operationally deployed nuclear warheads" (Louis Charbonneau, Reuters/Washington Post, Sept. 29).
There was no response from the U.S. State Department on the treaty talks, the Associated Press reported.
Lavrov said that international "strategic stability [is] being strained." He offered several examples, focusing on the United States, which has seen its relations with Russia become increasingly tense. The United States pulled out of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty, has sought to deploy missile defense installations in Europe and has placed military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, Lavrov said.
He reaffirmed Russian President Dmitry Medvedev's call for a security pact that would cover Europe, the United States, Canada and organizations such as NATO.
Nations are no longer guided by the principles of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, particularly "the need to avoid any means to strengthen your own security at the expense of the security of others," Lavrov said (Edith Lederer, Associated Press, Sept. 29).