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Moscow Will Not Allow U.S. Monitoring of Nuclear Arms Depots, Russian General Says
Russia has no plans to allow the United States to monitor its nuclear weapons sites, a top Russian military official said today (see GSN, April 21). “Our stand on the monitoring of nuclear weapon depots is firm: There is no access to these depots at present, and I do not think it will be granted in the near future,” Col. Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov was quoted as saying by Interfax. He added that Russia would reduce its ICBM forces by one or two divisions annually for the next five years in order to bring Moscow into compliance with a 2002 U.S.-Russian Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty. The pact obliges each side to reduce its deployed strategic nuclear arsenal by about two-thirds by 2012, the Associated Press reported. Russia will keep SS-18 ICBMs until 2014 to 2016, and plans to commission its first Topol-M mobile missile system next year, Solovtsov said (Associated Press, May 5). Meanwhile, rail-mobile SS-24 missile systems are expected to be decommissioned this year, Solovtsov told ITAR-Tass (Babkin/Kuznetsov, ITAR-Tass, May 5).
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