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U.S.-Russia: No Verification Measures Planned For Moscow Treaty The Bush administration plans to rely on START and the Cooperative Threat Reduction program to verify Russian compliance with the Strategic Offensive Arms Reduction Treaty, Assistant Secretary of State Paula DeSutter said this week (see GSN, June 5). The Bush administration sees the treaty as a complete document, and therefore no additional verification measures are needed, said DeSutter, head of the State Department’s Verification and Compliance Bureau. The bureau plans to examine what measures START and the CTR program will provide over the next two years, but “we are basically satisfied,” said Karin Look, DeSutter’s deputy who was involved in the treaty negotiations. If the bureau had been concerned about a lack of verification measures, “we would have pressed in the context of the negotiations and the ratification hearings to have something more in the treaty,” Look said (Thomas Duffy, Inside the Pentagon, July 24). At the time the treaty was signed in May 2002, Bush administration officials indicated that the United States and Russia would negotiate follow-on measures to the treaty (see GSN, May 24, 2002). “The verification stuff, all of that is going to go into the implementation agreement. These are essentially the details, the nitty-gritty and it’s being worked on, but it’s not done. It may take a little while,” National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton said when the treaty was signed (Greg Webb, GSN, July 24). The treaty calls for the creation of a Bilateral Implementation Commission, which may meet for the first time by the end of summer, according to Inside the Pentagon. Currently, the commission is not expected to do more than keep Washington and Moscow informed about the pace of each other’s disarmament, DeSutter said. “At the end of the day the MT [Moscow Treaty] has two obligations, one is to have the BIC meet and the other is to have both sides down to 1,700 to 2,200 warheads by 2012,” Look said. Look also said, however, that other U.S. agencies, as well as Russia itself, may still press for additional verification measures for the treaty. “Now will the Russians agree with us? I don’t know,” Look said. “Will there be other parts of the U.S. government that thinks there is something needed? I don’t know,” she said (Duffy, Inside the Pentagon).
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