The presidents of the United States and Russia said yesterday their governments would reach agreement next month on a successor to the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, but a U.S. official warned that the new deal would not be in place when the 1991 pact expires on Dec. 5, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Nov. 13).
(Nov. 16) -
U.S. President Barack Obama, left, speaks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday at a meeting in Singapore. The leaders agreed to work toward finalizing a nuclear arms control deal by the end of 2009 (Saul Loeb/Getty Images).
U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev agreed in July to cut their nations' respective deployed strategic nuclear arsenals to between 1,500 and 1,675 warheads, down from the 2,200-weapon limit the states are required to meet by 2012 under another treaty. The leaders also pledged to restrict strategic delivery vehicles on each side to between 500 and 1,100. (Agence France-Presse/Spacewar.com, Nov. 15).
"Our goal continues to be to complete the negotiations and to be able to sign a deal before the end of the year," Obama said yesterday during a press conference with Medvedev in Singapore, according to a White House transcript of his remarks. "I'm confident that if we work hard and with a sense of urgency about it that we should be able to get that done."
"We've talked a lot about the future START treaty and limitations of offensive weapons. We've agreed to give additional impetus to those negotiations, find solutions on remaining issues, because in some cases those are technical issues, some require political solution," Medvedev added. "We'll task our aides to continue working on those matters" (White House release, Nov. 15).
The powers have had problems reaching agreement on the number of nuclear-weapon delivery systems to allow under the new agreement, as well as whether to keep Russia's mobile ICBMs open to U.S. monitoring. In addition, Moscow has demanded a formal connection in the new treaty between strategic armaments and defensive systems targeting those weapons.
"What I do know for sure is that we will not have a ratified treaty in place by Dec. 5. It still has to go through the U.S. Senate and the Russian Duma," said Michael McFaul, the U.S. National Security Council's senior director for Russia.
"What is for sure is that we do need a bridging agreement," he said, noting that U.S. and Russian negotiators have discussed the terms of an interim deal alongside talks on the START successor (Agence France-Presse).
U.S. national security adviser Gen. James Jones and Kremlin foreign policy adviser Sergei Prikhodko discussed the bridge deal yesterday, McFaul added.
"Mr. Prikhodko ... met with General Jones today earlier in the day to talk about that, as well. It's more of a technical issue. It will be to continue -- but we haven't -- need to be clear, we don't have an agreement yet. There's no interruption. And the key thing there is verification,” ITAR-Tass quoted him as saying.
McFaul declined to predict when the new treaty would be complete (ITAR-Tass, Nov. 15).
"We are satisfied at the moment by the quality of open and pragmatic dialogue with the U.S. administration," Reuters quoted Prikhodko as saying. "It allows us to hope for fruitful work on problems, where a solution has not been found yet" (Oleg Shchedrov, Reuters, Nov. 14).
One analyst described multiple motivations behind the U.S.-Russian arms reduction process, Russia Today reported Saturday.
“One is to get down from the enormous levels of the nuclear weapons that characterized the relationship between the U.S. and Russia during the Cold War,” said Hans Kristensen, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Nuclear Information Project. “That’s what we are still working on. This treaty is still very much a step in that direction."
“It’s also about trying to change the future relationship between Russia and the U.S. so that their relationship is not so much focused on the strategic balance between the two, and that type of really Cold War-way of looking at each other,” he said.
Eventually, it “will be necessary to try to get other nuclear-weapon states involved in negotiations,” Kristensen added, warning that failing to do so would limit further arsenal reductions by Russia and the United States (Russia Today, Nov. 14).