U.S., Russia face tough nuclear talks to prevent next Cold War
MOSCOW - When Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev meet for the first time on April 1, a big part of "pressing the reset button" will be to rescue the two countries' dying arms control treaty and prevent a return to Cold War nuclear rivalry.
The "reset," Washington's image for redefining future U.S.-Russian relations, covers a tangle of issues. Critical among them is the replacement of one of the most important Cold War deals limiting the world's two largest nuclear arsenals - the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty.
START expires Dec. 5, and at their London summit, Obama and Medvedev are expected to announce talks on a new pact, whose outcome will color relations between Washington and Moscow for years to come.
But with an array of military and political issues to untangle, "the process will be very difficult," said Anton Khlopkov, director of the Moscow-based Center for Energy and Security Studies.
Signed in 1991 by Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev and President George H.W. Bush, the 700-page START resulted in the largest nuclear reductions in history. Essential to that was a mechanism that allowed the two sides to inspect and verify each other's arsenals.
"If one thing or another isn't done, then we'll end up in a legal vacuum and we won't know anything about the condition of (each other's) nuclear forces," said retired Maj. Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former arms control expert with the Russian Defense Ministry.
According to the U.S. State Department, as of July - the most recent official data available - Russia had about 4,100 warheads available for use on missiles based on land, on submarines and on long-range bombers. The United States had around 5,950. That includes warheads in storage - a major point of disagreement.
The talks are the first major arms control negotiations since 1997, when then-Presidents Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton made a new push to reach a START successor treaty that U.S. and Russian lawmakers would ratify.
That effort, however, was tied up for years by lawmakers in both countries and START II ultimately fell apart.
Instead the two powers produced the 2002 Treaty of Moscow, a page-long document committing them to slash their warheads to between 1,700 and 2,200 in number. It's considered far weaker than START.
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